[CentOS-devel] CentOS 4 Samba - More bugs (Was: Re: CentOS 4Samba - Excel 2002/2003 bug)

[Mike Fedyk]

Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: centos-devel-bounces at centos.org 
>> [mailto:centos-devel-bounces at 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