Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: centos-devel-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-devel-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Mike Fedyk Sent: Monday, February 26, 2007 5:54 PM To: The CentOS developers mailing list. Subject: Re: [CentOS-devel] CentOS 4 Samba - More bugs (Was: Re: CentOS 4Samba - Excel 2002/2003 bug)
Durval Menezes wrote:
Hello Folks,
FWI (and slightly OT), we have had no end of troubles with
the standard
3.0.10-EL4 Samba RPMs, specially regarding MS SMS
installations. We have
fixed all of them just by upgrading to Samba 3.0.23d,
rebuilt (with a
simple "rpmbuild --rebuild") from the SRPM available at http://ftp.sernet.de/pub/samba/src/samba3-3.0.23d-30.src.rpm
We have not yet tried the new 3.0.24 version, but we assume it would work just as well.
If you use LDAP authentication, there's a change in the Samba schema regarding indexing, mostly harmless but you will have to rebuild the LDAP indexes using slapindex (it's on the Release Notes).
If the upstream vendor used more up-to-date versions of
some packages
(3.0.10 is more than 2 years obsolete, for example) I think
there would
be much less crying and gnashing of teeth, but them maybe
it would be
much less fun too :-)
http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_backport.html
Enterprise distributions like Red hat, Suse, Ubuntu LTS and Debian all take the stance of stability and backport any bug fixes as they are needed.
That said, looking at the changelog for the samba does not show a lot of bug fixes being backported and looking at the list of open bugs I see several that are more than one year old and have been fixed by using the upstream source code instead. One had a patch 10 months after the initial report. The original reporter refused to go back to the distro version because upstream was working fine.
Am I only seeing the shadows or is it really as bad as the 1+ year old bug reports say?
I think the stable distros would be best served if they took applications like, gnome, kde, apache, samba, etc. out of their main repo and put them in a more dynamic repo that gets updated much more frequently.
One purpose for "Enterprise" distros is to insulate a system from the fast pace of the upstream open source projects and I have no problems with that. In fact, I am happy for that. One such upstream project that sorely needs that right now is asterisk and Fonality with trixbox (centos based) is in a position to do just that.
What I am questioning is whether some of those enterprise distributions are backporting enough of those bug fixes to get the good without all of the possibilities regressions that typically happen with upstream projects. Specifically with the rhel4 samba package, it looks like there need to be more resources put toward bug fixes.
Mike