smbmount mount_data format/kernel independence

[Urban Widmark]

Hello again
(yes, I'm still stuck on this issue)

I guess everyone that wanted to has replied (thanks David) to my idea on
making smbmount not use the kernel headers directly.
    (http://www.hojdpunkten.ac.se/054/smbmount-2.0.7-includes.patch)


A different, possibly better, idea would be to replace the current binary
format with an ascii format. This creates a similar relationship between
smbfs and smbmount as the one between vfat and mount, ext2 and mount, ...

The mount program parses the options and filters out the ones intended for
it (username, password, workgroup, ...) the rest is sent to smbfs and
parsed there. The command:
    mount -t smbfs -o username=foo,win95,soft,intr,case=sensitive //x/y /z
ends up sending as "mount_data" the string:
    version=7,win95,soft,intr,case=sensitive

This makes smbmount capable of handling (almost) any changes to the
flags/options passed since it does not need to understand (all of) them.
Not unlike some of the arguments for making smbmount use mount-style
syntax, it allows autofs to ignore what flags smbfs is using.

People will not have to wait for the next samba release (which may be
months away) or patch&recompile to be able to enable some
bugfix/workaround/improvement thing that was introduced after a given
version of samba.

Comments?

Obviously the existing binary format will still have to be supported for
some time.

/Urban