Hi! It come to my attention that a discussion is happening about samba and LTS (and the same applies to oldstable too).
The thing is: samba packages in bullseye and before, in my opinion, are hopeless. I know it because I know the state of debian packaging it was. For years (for a few debian releases), samba maintenance was more on auto-pilot. Most changes were made by applying a minimal change, not the right change. The result was.. horrible. Now, the Samba team basically re-designed whole VFS layer in 4.16, to fix a few serious issues with symlinks. This is not backportable to anything, and it changes quite big portion of the codebase, so subsequent fixes even in seemingly unrelated areas don't apply anymore (not all of them ofc). Upstream stopped supporting 4.13 (bullseye) version of samba even before bullseye release iirc. There were numerous alternative samba repositories all around the world to plug the gap between debian-provided samba and actual samba. There are numerous other security issues, compatibility issues with previous windows releases, and other stuff which basically makes samba in bullseye (already, not to mention buster!) basically unusable. Trying to fix an issue or two there will work. This particular issue with Jul-23 windows10/11 update is trivial to fix, the same change applies (with minimal context fix) to 4.7 version of samba too. But I urge not doing this. This will bring false sense of security. People will think samba in buster or bullseye is worth to keep since it is being "supported", - it is not due to other numerous issues. It is like with old crypto, - you fix a buffer overflow in some DES implementation, but it does not mean DES can be used in 2023. If there's a need for samba in buster, it can be fixed. See for example my repository at http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/packages/samba/ - it provides amd64 binaries of all current samba packages on actual Debian and Ubuntu releases, - I spent quite some time to ensure it all works fine on different environments and the original debian packages can be built on older debian releases and on various ubuntu releases. This currently does not include buster, but it is kinda trivial to fix. My repository happens to become quite popular (by the amount of downloads, amount of screaming once I turned it off for 5 minutes for a reboot, and amount of questions I received after the Jul-23 windows update), - so something like this is needed (or was, anyway, for older releases). Buster and bullseye versions of samba are not supported. Please don't use band-aid on a dead horse. Thanks! /mjt
