Re: smb: more than broken?

Philip Blundell (Philip.Blundell@pobox.com)
Tue, 16 Dec 1997 09:15:29 +0000


>It requires you to download the *source* to samba, and apply a patch to
>it. It won't work then, though. Now you have to go get a new version
>of smbmount, because the old one no longer works. This new version of
>smbmount is distributed by source only, stored in a directory ominously
>called "dontuse". Are you scared yet?

This isn't anything unusual for kernel development, to be honest. "dontuse"
has been the traditional directory name for beta-quality software for a long
time - it doesn't mean that the developers somehow don't want you using it,
just that they don't want you _trusting_ it.

>If worst comes to worst, maybe we should even consider just backtracking
>to the 2.0 smbfs, if this one proves unmanagable? Right now it looks
>very bleak indeed...

I don't think things are actually noticeably worse than with 2.0, except for
the build drama (which you have to expect really).

>* Roll 'smbmount' into 'mount'. If 'smbclient' is really necessary, let
>'mount' start it up.

I agree. Also, `smbmount' needs to massage sharenames so that they're in a
legal format for mtab; at the moment I run in to trouble with programs like
`df' because one of my SMB mounts has a space in the middle.

>should be fixed at the source (samba) or rolled into the existing
>'mount' command (NFS uses 'mount', why can't we?).

I doubt it's deliberate to keep them separate, it just tends to happen that
way at first. If you want to do the work to merge them and make them
glibc-safe then I daresay many people would be grateful.

p.