Bubulle's weblog

I spent the entire week at the SambaXP conference in Göttingen, Germany. The conference is the annual conference of the community of developers, contributors and users of Samba. I general call it "my annual german pilgrimage" as I attended all seven editions of the conference, the only FLOSS conference I attend on my work time, as my daily work involves quite a lot of uses of samba.

This year featured a workshop or training session held by John Terpstra, longstanding FLOSS evangelist and member of the Samba Team for over 10 years, and Karolin Seeger, the brand new release manager of Samba.

This has indeed been an incredible opportunity to have discussions with them about the packaging work for Samba. Actually, the work we did in the last 3 years to bring Samba Debian packages in a very good shape (when I don't screw up) is much appreciated. I think these days have been another opportunity to keep that link very closed.

I have been impressed by the promising work of Karolin with respect to the preparation of the release and the very serious way she has to do that work....as well as her very friendly, while still discreet approach to technical discussion.

Some work was done on Samba package bugs, though less than usually (the remaining ones are harder and harder to tackle!). I mostly work on Debian packages as well as .deb packages prepared by Sernet (the services company that organises the conference and employer of some Samba Team members), as these could some day become the packages provided by the Samba Team.

Talks at the conference were pretty interesting, to keep connected with Samba 3.2 and 4.0 development. News from Andrew Tridgell about exchanges with Microsoft (yes, The Evil) and access to MS documentation, are very promising. The collaboration between Samba developers and Microsoft enginneers is now working well again, at the engineers level (as Tridge says: "lawyers are away, now, we can talk at the engineers level and restore the link that existed in the early 90's").

I also could measure the progress of the Openchange project whose ultimate aim is to provide a complete Microsoft Exchange replacement solution. They currently have working MAPI libraries and an Evolution plugin for Exchange is under development, while the bricks to build a server are patiently being put together. Good discussions with Julien Kerihuel, the lead (and French) developer and manager of the project.

Jelmer Vernooij and I also settled the final plans to get Samba4 packages in Debian. I proposed to make a first upload to experimental, but quite soon to upload to unstable, the point being a largest as possible exposure of that code, so that upstream developers (Jelmer himself, Andrew Bartlett and a few others...) get as much feedback as possible. That upload will not be targeted for lenny (we'll block it from entering testing). For that reason and also because Samba 3 and 4 will certainly coexist for years, the source package will be named "samba4". Expect more news quite soon.

And final conclusion of that week: I've also been delighted to be able to visit Alex and Meike in Hildesheim, as well as Andreas in Wernigerode. It's always a great pleasure to see longstanding Debian friends. At the beginning of the week, I planned to see *two DD and finally, at the end of the week, I can tell I've seen *three* Debian developers, finally!