Next round of libsmbclient ...

[Richard Sharpe]

Hi Folks,

Here are some ruminations on improvements to libsmbclient that are 
motivated by discussions with Andrew Bartlett and my own current needs.

Andrew expressed a need to be able to create new connections to servers as 
if you are pretending to be separate clients. I have also run into this 
need.

I want to be able to write a single program that pretends to be, say, 100 
clients, and then have each client open 1,000 files (all with oplocks) and 
then force breaks and so on, and see if things break :-)

Now, the issues that concern me are:

1. Backward compatibility. Is it important at this stage?

2. API design issues. There needs to be a separate init routine that inits 
the package. Then there needs to be a separate client_init routine, that 
creates a new client and all the data structures it needs. This should 
return a void * that is a handle to the client, and that handle is passed 
to all the routines.

3. I need to be able to tell the library that I want to use OpLocks and 
the sort of OpLocks I want to use.

4. Currently, if you are not in the library, it does not listen for 
packets off the wire. I might need a separate thread or something that is 
always interacting with the server (handling OpLock breaks ...)

All suggestions/ideas useful

Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe at ns.aus.com, rsharpe at samba.org, 
sharpe at ethereal.com