MIR for autofs5

[Chuck Short]

Binary package hint: autofs5

Rationale: The Ubuntu Server team would like to replace autofs4 (currently in main) with autofs5. This is part of the server-lucid-seeds specification.

The only real violations are the following:

557865 - http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=557865
539673 - http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=539673

If you have any questions please let me know.

Regards
chuck

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Do you know why there is a separate autofs5 package, instead of just updating the autofs package? Can autofs be removed from the archive after moving to autofs5?

There are no reverse dependencies of autofs (4), it's a simple seed change.

Will review packages, etc. in a bit.

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

autofs5 was deemed the experimental branch for autofs in linux, so thats why it was packaged seperately. However most modern linux distrobutions are using autofs5.

chuck

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

It seems that #557865 is resolved in our package, thanks. Packaging looks mostly okay.

The diff.gz has tons and tons of patches (most of them backported apparently). Aren't there enough upstream releases of autofs5?

Related to that, is 5 still considered "experimental"? Those kinds of branches often get intrusive and incompatible changes during their development, which might cause troubles for LTS users which later upgrade to a later version of the 5 branch?

What was the rationale to switch to an experimental branch in an LTS?

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the review.

I dont think autofs5 is considered to be experimental anymore. Most major distros such as RHEL and OpenSuse are also using autofs5. I have seen cases where autofs5 has worked better than autofs4.

The rationale to switch to an experimental branch is that it was required by corporate services as well.

Regards
chuck

[Boris Devouge (bdevouge)]

Autofs5 was created as it originally allowed to remove a limitation of the numbers of anonymous bind against ldap one could do with autofs4. The rationale of this MIR is that majority of customers will set up autofs5 rather than 4, and that in 9.04 Jaunty we had a situation where autofs4 was in main, but autofs5 was not. This did not give a lot of confidence to customers, and the logic as to why one would be fully supported and not the other was missing.

Autofs5 is definitely not experimental anymore, and is ran in production (one of our customer runs autofs5 with about 20 000 users in production). Also, if we are to look at other Enterprise distros, autofs5 will be default, and autofs4 is also packaged and installable 'just in cases.

Hope this helps.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Thanks to you both. Sounds fine, please go ahead and change the seeds.

Wrt. upgrading, can we remove the autofs source package and build transitional packages in autofs5, to not leave people with old versions on upgrade?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

promoted