"map archive" issues?

[acherry at pobox.com]

Quick question about Samba's handling of the the DOS "Archive"
attribute:

I notice that the default is "map archive = yes".  According to John
Blair's book, the reason this was set as the default was because
"there are a large number of PC applications that fail if the archive
bit does not work as expected".

I'm a bit confused by this -- I would normally expect only
backup/restore programs to care about the archive bit.  What other
sorts of applications have been found to have problems?  Are these
typically Win32 applications, or is the problem primarily with the
16-bit clients?  Our PCs run NT 4.0 almost exclusively.

(FYI, we've used Solstice Network Client in our environment for a long
time, and it appears to always show the archive bit as "on", unless
you tell it to always show it as "off" :-) .. i.e. it does no mapping)

My second question is perhaps more in the vein of this mailing list's
subject matter.  We use Veritas HSM in our environment, which migrates
files not accessed in a long time to secondary storage (optical then
tape).  Veritas HSM sets the sticky bit on migrated files as a marker
to tell users which files have been archived (it doesn't actually rely
on this to do migrations, it's just a convenience feature).  I've
been thinking about adding an smb.conf option to explicitly set which
UNIX permissions bit is associated with the Archive attribute, so I
can have migrated files appear as "archived" (obviously I'd have to use
a appropriate "create mode" to prevent NT from SETTING the bit and
really confusing matters).  Is there any likelihood that such a
feature would be accepted back into the Samba code base?  Veritas in
particular might be interested in this feature since they bundle Samba
with Veritas File Server Edition. But I'm reluctant to make hacks to
Samba that I'd have to re-do when the next release comes out.

Thanks, as always!

-Andrew