[linux-cifs-client] should we separate out the cifs utilities from the samba tree?

Jeff Layton jlayton at samba.org
Tue Jan 26 09:05:48 MST 2010


Lately we've had a number of "security" fire drills that have required
us to patch all of the previous samba branches. This is a major pain...

Right now, the cifs utilities in samba (mount.cifs and cifs.upcall) are
only really there as a matter of convenience. They're not really part
of samba in any material way, and really ought to be something we
package separately.

Decoupling the cifs utils from samba would be easier for distro
packagers too. No need to do an entire samba release if there's a
mount.cifs problem and vice versa...

I'd like to start splitting those tools out into a separate cifs-utils
git tree and tarball. I'll probably still host those at samba.org for
the forseeable future.

The main stumbling block at this point is the fact that cifs.upcall
links in some libsmbclient objects during the build. Before we can
separate them we'll have to make cifs.upcall not do that. I may need
some help and guidance from people better versed in krb5 programming.

Anyone have thoughts or objections to this plan?

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton at samba.org>


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