It's been some time since I didn't send an update about samba packages in Debian. Here it is. Fairly long, sorry for this.
As preliminary facts: Debian entered a full freeze in Mid-August, in preparation of the next release, codename "squeeze". It means that packages uploaded to Debian unstable no longer migrate to testing (which is "the next release", so squeeze right now) when they had 10 days without RC bugs and when they're built on all supported architectures. During a freeze, packages do migrate semi-manually after being unblocked by Debian release team on request of the package maintainers. The release team requests avoiding upstream version updates during a freeze. Situation of samba in squeeze ----------------------------- We will have samba 3.5 in squeeze. At this moment, this is 3.5.5. We are very grateful to Debian release team as they allowed upgrading from 3.4.8 to 3.5.* *during the freeze* which breaks the official freeze rules! I have some hope to convince our RT to follow next 3.5 updates but that will be on a case by case basis. The clear policy adopted by the Samba Team for updates will help..:-) We have one release critical bug to tackle: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=593823 (undeclared library backwards-incompatibility between 3.2.5 and 3.4...probably 3.5 also, in libwbclient) Situation of samba in lenny --------------------------- (lenny is the current stable release of Debian. Release in Feb. 2009, it has samba 3.2.5) We updated our 3.2.5 packages with the patch for the last unveiled security issue (CVE-2019-3069). Users of lenny who have security.debian.org in their sources.list files probably already got the update. Situation of samba in experimental ---------------------------------- Debian experimental is meant for prospective package development. During freezes, it's often use to have last upstream releases when they're not suitable anymore in unstable because of the freeze. At this moment, we no longer have interesting stuff there (we used to have 3.5 when the target for squeeze was 3.4.*). We will probably have 3.6. However, my last attempts to build it when 3.6.0pre1 was released resulted in a failure because of disappearing symbols in libraries (which should be discussed with the Samba Team). Situation of Samba 4 -------------------- No samba4 packages in squeeze. Packages are judged as too experimental yet. Old outdated samba4 packages are currently in unstable. More recent ones are in experimental. The plan is to update packages in unstable with the last released version of samba4 (alpha14). Jelmer Vernooij is in charge of this and will do it...as soon as he finds a timeslot for that..:) Backports for lenny ------------------- Debian recently integrated "backports" as a (nearly) fully official service (well, some implementation issues remain to be done in the BTS). "Official" backports for Debian stable (so, lenny, ATM) follow a strict policy. The packages have to be the same version than the one in testing and maintainers must commit to update them as carefully as they'd do for packages in Debian stable. See http://backports.debian.org for details and instructions about how to use backports Official backports for samba now feature samba 3.5.5 since a few days. These packages are as close as possible to those in squeeze (some packaging features that don't exist in lenny are dropped, though). Unofficial backports -------------------- Besides official backports, we do maintain unofficial packages for users who might want different packages than those officially supported. Please be warned that these packages are updated less frequently then official ones. This might be a concern for those who are keen about security fixes. These unofficial backports live at http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org. They're built for i386 and amd64 architectures only. At this moment, we have there: - no longer maintained backports for etch. Don't use them. Don't use etch anymore..:-). Yes, I should remove that old crap. - "lenny-backports": these feature samba 3.2.15 (latest released 3.2) for those users who want to stick with 3.2 on their servers (for instance, because they haven't gone through all regression tests on mission critical servers)...but are hit by some bug of 3.2.5 I actually needed those for a server of mine and decided to share them..:-) - "lenny-backports-latest": these feature, for lenny, the last version of samba released by the Samba Team when we cannot have it in official backports. At this moment, there is nothing interesting there (indeed, there is 3.5.4) as official backports *do* have the latest released samba. I should even remove what's there right now. 3.6 packages for lenny will probably land there when 3.6 is released. We hope that this status update is helping users of samba in Debian. Please don't hesitate to discuss issues and wishes in mailing lists on samba.org, we try to be watching out things there...at least /me..:-) In name of the packaging team for samba and related packages in Debian (Noèl Köthe, Steve Langasek, Mathieu Parent, Christian Perrier, Jelmer Vernooij). -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba