Hey community, for a way too long time Gentoo's samba packages lack the attention they would require to keep them top notch and as useful as possible for our users.
The reason I started to take minimum care of our samba packages was because my former employer used Gentoo on his Linux server (guess why? :D) and as there were also samba servers among them I had slight interest in Gentoo's samba packages to be at least up to date on a security point of view. After I started work for my new employer this interest lowered even more and all I am doing right now is simple version bumps on all samba (and related) packages nobody else seems to take care of. The situation in Gentoo became even worse when upstream discontinued the 3.6.x series which still is the only samba version in Gentoo that is multilib capable. Given this fact I decided to unmask samba-4.0 and samba-4.1 series although both still suffering from two major problems: * Until now all samba-4 packages are not multilib ready [1] * samba-4 packages require heimdal, a kerberos implementation that unfortunately cannot be installed in parallel with mit-krb5 package [2] So here comes a really seriously meant call for help: Gyus, if you _are_ interested in samba then please try to invest time and knowledge so we can make Gentoo's samba packages better. To be honest there are some trip wires that make solutions to the two above mentioned problems (and possibly others) a bit difficult: * samba upstream is extremely uncooperative. Best example is that we still have some automagic dependencies [5] in samba's build system and upstream is not very keen on fixing these. * samba (and related) packages are using waf as build system. One of the most ugliest build systems I ever had the bad luck to be involved with. * To make samba-4 (and related) packages multilib ready, we might need to make python multilib ready first. I'm not sure this requirement is still necessary - we should ask mgorny about this :) * We should really get heimdal and mit-krb5 packages in a shape where we can install them in parallel [2]. Using the bundled heimdal from samba is no valid option [3] * Stabilization of samba-4 still needs to go a long road [4] Once again, we need your help so please help. If you are willing to do so and have no commit access, well... I have and as long as the contributions from any volunteer meet the Gentoo standards I am more than happy to commit any improvements as proxy maintainer. If they don't meet the standards, I'm quite sure we can work those issues out together. Kind regards Lars [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/534432 [2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/490872 https://bugs.gentoo.org/542462 [3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Why_not_bundle_dependencies [4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/489762 [5] https://bugs.gentoo.org/489748 https://bugs.gentoo.org/489770 -- Lars Wendler Gentoo package maintainer GPG: 4DD8 C47C CDFA 5295 E1A6 3FC8 F696 74AB 981C A6FC
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