SMB URL

[Michael B. Allen]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2003 08:20:17 +0100
Stephan Kulow <coolo at kde.org> wrote:

> > We did reach an important conclusion that would be influential to anyone
> > writing an SMB URL parser. That is, even though SMB URLs do not require
> > Unicode characters be escaped (for practical reasons) they should be
> > able to decode escaped Unicode characters. This begs the question; how
> > do you escape Unicode characters? The prevailing answer appears to be
> > specified in the W3C IRI documents which suggest each escape should be
> > treated as a byte in a UTF-8 multibyte sequence.
> >
> > Otherwise, the SMB URL is reasonably well defined. Unicode handling was
> > the only remaining issue I believe. The jCIFS client implements all of
> > this functionality minus the decoding of escaped UTF-8 sequences.
> >
> > Please join the jCIFS mailing list if you have specific questions. We
> > have had many interesting discussions there about the SMB URL, we have
> > implemented it completely, and there are three people who understand it
> > quite well. Chris and Eric have the brains. Me type.
> >
> > I'm not familiar with the state of the libsmbclient SMB URL handling.
> Well, as you say yourself, the client needs to be able to decode escaped
> characters (you always say unicode characters, but that's not the only 
> problem, you need to descape '?', '=', '@' and similar characters too, that

Sure.

> So while libsmbclient doesn't need code to escape any characters as it
> never returns URLs, but just names or data, it urgently needs code to
> descape them.

I wouldn't say "urgently". JCIFS is getting along without it ok at the
moment. It depends where their being used. One such case is when they
are embedded in the PATH_INFO of an HTTP URL however it would also be
necessary to provide an escape function to the author so that the URLs
are properly escaped using UTF-8.

> The other part missing is the query handling. Currently libsmbclient relies
> on ~/.smb/smb.conf for the workgroup (which is a bit problematic when you
> want to copy files from one workgroup to another from a linux client ;(
> Above that it gives a ?WORKGROUP=COOLO - no such file

I'm not sure I understand this. Do you mean domain? Does libsmbclient
support the forms:

  smb://domain;user:pass@server/share/path/to/file

and

  smb://workgroup/

Wouldn't these resolve the issue (which ever it is) you describe. I think
SCOPE and WINS (or Chris prefers NBNS) are probably the only parameters
that are necessary for a completely autonomous SMB URL.

I fear the different SMB URL implementations are probably quite different
when it comes to semantic details :-( It would be nice to see them become
uniform.

Mike

-- 
A  program should be written to model the concepts of the task it
performs rather than the physical world or a process because this
maximizes  the  potential  for it to be applied to tasks that are
conceptually  similar and, more important, to tasks that have not
yet been conceived.