[Samba] Samba 4.16 and 4.17 ubuntu focal and jammy packages

[Michael Tokarev]

28.10.2022 11:40, Kees van Vloten wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> I just checked the repos you recently made available for Ubuntu. You have separate repos for Ubuntu versions and also for Samba versions. This 
> approach mimics the structure Louis has.

I don't really know about the structure of Louis repository - I never looked there.

> I know the the Debian packages are available in the Debian repos, for Buster mainly backports for a recent version. But Debian has a single repo with 
> a single Samba version. Would it be possible to publish the Debian packages (similar to Ubuntu) in a repo per Samba version on corpit.ru/mjt ?

It is not really like this on Debian.

The thing is that for Debian stable, we have 2 versions available: the one
shipped with bullseye (with most updates, at least the ones which didn't
require painful backporting), and the one available in the backports.

For bookworm, it will be bookworm release and bookworm-backports too (well,
hopefully anyway).  If bookworm were released earlier this year, it would
be 4.16 in bookworm and 4.17 in bpo, or something like that.

So that's two. It's possible to support buster-backports-sloppy as well,
and bullseye-backports-sloppy once bookworm will be out.

For debian unstable, there are again - for now - two version of samba
to choose from: it is unstable version, and it is experimental version.
Currently 4.17 is in experimental, and it is not available for debian
bullseye (current stable), -- this is because I'm not confident with
4.17 yet, myself. See the recent 4.17.2 bugfix release, - the CVE issue
with directory escape via symlinks. If it were not that, I'd move to
4.17 for unstable too, and stop providing 4.16 packages completely.

I don't want to publish two versions of samba for any of the "supported"
distributions. Once I'm confident enough with 4.17, I will stop 4.16
packaging completely, and will focus on 4.17 entirely, for everything
including ubuntu and debian stable and debian unstable.

There's just no reason - in my opinion anyway - to provide packages for
older releases of samba.  I can branch the debian developer repository's
master branch in the point where we'll finally switch to 4.17, and it
should be easy to create subsequent releases of 4.16.x from there,
without touching any packaging stuff, just importing new upstream
versions and building new binaries. Especially once the dust settles
after the (minor) ubuntu changes I made in the packaging.

Also, Debian discourages using external repositories, and I understand
very well where this comes from, and support it.

My goal is to support single "good" current samba version for various
distributions. It is already happening for Debian, and it will happen
for Ubuntu as well. It is doable from a single line of development.

I provided 4.17 packages in there as experimental, to see if whole
thing actually works. It is the same as with experimental 4.17 for
Debian.  I hope to switch to 4.17 entirely in a near future.

Thanks,

/mjt