Print Share Name Length

[John H Terpstra]

Hi all,

We (the Samba Team) need some feed back from our user community.
Anyone want to help out? All you need to do is post us a one liner.
Tell us if you want 8 character length limited print share names or larger.
If you really must have longer print share names - then how many characters?
Should we limit the length?

Background:
>From time to time we receive patches to increase the maximum length of a
printer share. The default in Samba is 8 characters. This default causes printer
names that are longer than 8 characters in the /etc/printcap file to NOT appear
in the printer browse list.

If we were to remove this limitation and allow more than 8 characters then
we will get complaints from some users who use older SMB clients (eg: old WfW,
Older DOS clients, etc.). In order to avoid these complaints we have kept the
8 character limit in place.

The real question now at hand is this: How long after one has eaten the chicken
ought we hold on to it's legs? Given that the old SMB clients are really quite
obsolete, should we continue to live with this limitation.

Samba-1.9.17 is now in alpha 5 and is due for release within a week or two,
if we get enough passionate requests to bury the limitation - then we will
make that happen. After all, we do wish our users a peaceful existence!

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John H Terpstra - Samba Team
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If all the politicians in the world were laid end on end they would reach no further than
their policies! Their mileage may vary!