practical GitLab steps for the Samba (4.17) LTS project

[Andrew Bartlett]

A few eagle eyed observers will have noticed 
https://www.freexian.com/blog/samba-4.17-lts/

Freexian is very keen to build a community able to support specific
Samba releases, initially Samba 4.17 in this case, for longer than the
Samba Team is promising. 

As mentioned in the blog, they are working with my employer Catalyst to
get things going, with regard to the actual engineering. 

I'm keen to meet a few goals with this effort:

 - make this as much of a community effort as possible
 - be as to be as transparent as possible
 - have a clear agreed, tested tree as to what patches are included in
a Samba 4.17 LTS (so patches are not forgotten).
 - Not be confused for upstream Samba releases, but still have a
trustworthy canonical location. 

What I'm thinking to do is to have a repo under our Samba Team
namespace at (say) https://gitlab.com/samba-team/lts/samba that would
hold the canonical LTS tree.  We would do all the development work for
the LTS in GitLab as normal, except for patches under embargo (if any
work is done pre-embargo).  This in particular will ensure we can use
the GitLab CI system and the Samba Team's runners and GitLab runner
quota to ensure everything keeps working.   

Unlike upstream Samba however, we will do the merge (with rebase) on
GitLab, so as not to put requirements on the autobuild host (it is
fairly easy to keep old CI runners going).  In the short term we would
keep to the Samba Team's rules on patch review, but the LTS team may
adopt different practices over time as the effort develops. 

If possible, it would also be nice if we could have this mirrored to
git.samba.org as a backup. 

To be clear, this would be an LTS only for security patches,
we don't plan to re-open development of other fixes. 

Finally, we do need to track what patches are being worked on etc.  I'm
hoping this will be OK to do in Samba's bugzilla (as this is available
pre-disclosure), perhaps as child bugs. 

Does anybody have any thoughts on this?

Andrew Bartlett


-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001) https://samba.org
Samba Team Lead                https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba
Catalyst.Net Ltd

Proudly developing Samba for Catalyst.Net Ltd - a Catalyst IT group
company

Samba Development and Support: https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba

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