Comment 3 for bug 323601

Feature Freeze Exception request

Please hereby consider granting a feature freeze exception for the inclusion of Likewise Open 5.0 in Jaunty.

This new version brings a new backend architecture and key improvements over the old likewise-open packages (4.1):
* New threaded authentication service (lsassd) results in improved system responsiveness under heavy load, faster online/offline detection for mobile users
* Inclusion of idmap compatibility plugins for Samba 3 file and print servers.
* DCE/RPC support for TCP, UDP, and Named Pipes transports
* New auditing and logging service (eventlogd) utilizing an sqlite3 storage engine
* New domain controller location service (netlogond)
Those features are highly desirable for better integration of Ubuntu systems into enterprise Active Directory environments. Lots of users already run Likewise Open 5 using the Likewise-provided debs, which are not integrated properly with Ubuntu and break various things.

Unfortunately upstream provides no upgrade path from 4.1 to 5.0, short of uninstalling completely the old package and reinstalling the new one. That would result in the necessity to leave the AD domain and rejoin it. This is not acceptable in most cases (where the local Ubuntu admin may not have Domain administration passwords required for that operation, and find himself locked out of the domain at the end of the upgrade). To protect our existing users against this while still delivering the key functionality present in version 5.0, we propose to provide Likewise Open 5 as a separate conflicting package. That way, domain users upgrading to Jaunty will stay in the domain, and may switch manually to 5 if they want to.

This is the main reason why this is proposed as a new source package. We'll work together with upstream to provide a seamless way of upgrading from 4 to 5 in Karmic, in order to phase out usage of Likewise-Open 4 without disrupting existing domain users.

Proposing it as a separate package also reduces the impact of granting this Feature Freeze exception, since existing users won't be affected and nothing depends on the new package.

Proposed packaging is in my PPA (package likewise-open5) and is currently being reviewed by several other Canonical Server Team MOTUs for correctness. There are still a couple known (non-technical) issues with it that will be fixed before upload, should this exception be granted.