[csw-maintainers] Samba 4

[Laurent Blume]

On 03/09/13 11:29, slowfranklin wrote:
> I'd simply like to avoid a version suffix if possible. If that is not
> possible for valid reason, and in the context of OpenCSWs current
> state of branches imo Laurent has brought up valid concerns, then
> lets keep the current design of the Samba 4 package recipe and add a
> 4 suffix to the packages. There are several other packages that have
> versioned names too.

To be honest, I'm not sure I understand the rationale for removing the 
version suffix (I'm not the one who named the current Samba 3 packages, 
I'd have kept the number).

What's better without a version suffix? Either way look good to me from 
the user viewpoint, but one makes transitions harder for the maintainers.

Of course, that's for critical tools, it's not a casual user that will 
install Samba in the first place, I expect one to have some knowledge of it.

Now since we're really talking about having as recent as possible 
packages for Solaris 10 - well, someone who is still using Solaris 10 
must already have some incentive to stay on older versions, else they'd 
have switched to a more recent OS.
So for some software like Samba which can have a lot of complicated 
interactions, I will advocate strongly keeping the older versions as 
long as they are supported and it is reasonably doable.
That applies to MySQL, for which I will keep 5.5 running even when we 
finally have 5.6 (I'd have kept 5.1 if it had been done).

Some other programs which are much less critical, of course, I believe 
they can be upgraded, and without keeping a version suffix.
Say, eg, vim: a casual user can install that, and the exact major 
version won't have much influence.

> I'd prefer to have a unstable catalog that could be used for its
> purpose and a testing catalog that offered a set of older, stable
> packages, but afaict testing is far from that.
>
> What happened to the automatic package promotion from unstable to
> testing that is descibed on the website? Eg
> <http://wiki.opencsw.org/releases-and-staging#toc20>:
>
> "Packages from unstable/ that have no bugs filed against them, are
> promoted to testing/"
>
> If we had something like that we could easily honor Laurent's
> concerns by going ahead and adding a unversioned Samba 4 package (ie
> no 4 suffix) and file a bug against it preventing promotion.

Yes, the path forward needs to be defined, but I'm afraid it'll be more 
an issue of resources than anything else :-/

Laurent