First of all let me reconsider my opinion after a carefully read on Quanah arguments and references about OpenLDAP packages around some distros. I had read the archives of this list, specifically about GnuTLS problems with OpenLDAP on Debian and now I understand the point of view of OpenLDAP developers. In fact, not only understands as I fully support it now. So sorry if was missing the point at my first email.
I feel very sad to hear about the lack of resources on Debian and most sad with myself to not be involved on it as much as I wish. I use Debian every day on my work and I couldn't help the Debian community in the same way that the community help me. I hope that I can change this some day and become heavily involved to help in the packages maintenance.
Keep up with this great work in OpenLDAP development and support guys! :)
On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 8:38 PM, Russ Allbery rra@stanford.edu wrote:
Dan Pritts danno@internet2.edu writes:
On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 10:36:09AM -0400, Alex McKenzie wrote:
perhaps something the devels should think about. If they decide to continue on the way they have... well, that's their option. It's their project, and they can do what they want with it. But they should at least be aware that people are concerned about the current methods.
I tend to agree with Alex, FWIW, but I too recognize that I get what I pay for.
Out of fairness want to note that the most significant component of the problems with the OpenLDAP packages for Debian (and Ubuntu, to a somewhat lesser degree) is that the packaging team has basically no resources. Only two of us have done much work over the past year or two, and then only as we've found time, and neither of the two of us who are active have any free time to spare to increase the amount of work that we're doing significantly.
This is not something that either is the fault of the OpenLDAP project or something that any of the OpenLDAP developers can address even if they wanted to unless they wanted to become experts in Debian packaging. Debian and Ubuntu need more people with a thorough understanding of Debian packaging working on improving the packages.
At this point, nearly all complaints about the state of the Debian packages are rightfully directed at the lack of resources on the Debian side. There may be some issues that could be reasonably considered a shared responsibility were the packages in much better shape, but at this point they're swamped by the lack of volunteer resources to absorb new upstream releases and do reasonable bug triage.
Unfortunately, we're currently in a state where the people involved in the packaging don't have enough free time to teach even interested parties about packaging so that they can come up to speed and help. We really need volunteers who already know the packaging components and can start working at that level without needing much additional resources or training. Both Steve and I are already doing about a dozen other high-profile things for Debian and are both involved in the packaging of OpenLDAP primarily out of pure self-interest in not wanting to see the packages go completely untended, not because we have any realistic ability to maintain the packages as they properly should be maintained.
I do the Debian package maintenance for OpenAFS, which has a similar or higher change rate as OpenLDAP and also doesn't do a lot of support for old stable versions, but the end user experience is much, much better and the same complaints are not present simply because on the packaging side I'm able to apply more resources. I have the time to aggressively package new versions, pull up upstream changes inbetween releases (admittedly, made *far* easier than it would be for OpenLDAP by OpenAFS's use of Git), and backport newer versions for users of Debian stable. When Debian users of OpenAFS run into problems fixed in later versions, I can just tell them to go to the version from backports.org to solve their problem. This doesn't require any additional work from the OpenAFS upstream maintainers.
There's absolutely no reason why the same thing couldn't be true of the OpenLDAP packages for Debian and Ubuntu, without any changes whatsoever to how the OpenLDAP developers run their project. All it requires is volunteers and time.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/