Samba LTS Community
Samba LTS Community
At https://gitlab.com/samba-team/lts-community/samba some Samba community members are collaborating to provide backports for Samba 4.17 for longer than the official Samba release cycle.
Our goal is to build a community able to provide security backport support for Samba 4.17 for up to 5 years from the original 4.17.0 release
A community effort
This is not an effort of the Samba Team itself, but the Samba Team is grateful to provide a neutral host and the CI so that quality can be maintained by the community members doing the work.
The hope that this can be a truly community collaboration for those who need to keep older Samba versions going for a bit longer (you do not need to be on the Samba Team to help with backports of public patches).
This effort is seeking broader community collaboration: true success for this effort will come when all who need Samba 4.17 supported a bit longer to work with us on the backport efforts.
We know that Samba moves fast, and so we hope this is a useful service to those who can't move as fast as the main release/use/deprecation cycle dictates.
Scope: Security only
Only security patches that meet the requirements for a Samba security release per the Samba Security Process will be included. Functionality updates and bug fixes are not eligible.
Status
Process
GitLab
- The official LTS tree will not be in the main Git repo, but at the Samba LTS community repo as v4-17-stable
- Proposed backports will be prepared as GitLab merge requests.
- The Samba Team's rule of two-team members to approve each change will apply. Developers not on the Samba Team are welcome to propose the backports, it just needs review by two Samba Team members prior to merge.
Bugzilla
- Some patches may be backported, under embargo, in the Samba Bugzilla, and will be proposed for merge at publication time.
Mailing lists
- Mailing list collaboration will be on samba-technical if required.
Releases
- It is not initially proposed to continue the version stream - distributions using this should apply the patches here on top of the last official release.
- We are open to a discussion about what our users need.
Lifetime
The Samba LTS effort hopes to continue while the backport task remains feasible and the engineering effort can be sustained. A specific lifetime is not promised, but the desire is to support the chosen releases for five years from the first (eg 4.17.0) Samba release.