Mind if I read your code?

[Juan Lang]

--- Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> wrote:
> I've noticed some of that growing there, and I've
> been wondering if it
> might be less painful to simply link in
> libsmbclient, under some
> pluign mechanism.  That is, if users want to use the
> GPLed
> functionlity, they can simply load the plugin.  (And
> be subsequenctly
> restricted by the GPL, but that doesn't harm users
> that much).

Hm, that's an avenue I hadn't considered.  I
appreciate creative thinking in this area.

Why I haven't gone further with libsmbclient, besides
licensing:  its interface is simply too high-level. 
Using it would add very nice high-level attributes
(reading and writing files files), but lots of the
other code that's useful to the Wine project is
hidden.  Named pipes, NetBT, mailslots, RPC and
authentication all have public APIs in Windows, so
eventually have to be implemented anyway.  By the time
these are done adding file support doesn't seem like
such a big deal.

> In any case, I find it silly that we use licences to
> put up such large
> barriers between us...  

Agreed, but as I was not involved in choosing
licenses, I have to respect those that exist. 
Personally, I like the GPL, and think it's an
appropriate license for Samba.  People are able to
make money using an LGPL'd Wine, and more power to
them IMO.  Ne'er the twain shall meet, unfortunately.

One issue brought up here before, in a less politic
way than I would have liked, is the port-grabbing one.
 Do you folks see a way we might be able to run
NetBIOS servers through some plug-in mechanism?

I have a personal itch to scratch--Wine _was_ able to
open files before, but you had to know the UNC path
and type it in.  I just want a network neighborhood
browser.  I'm trying to do it The Right Way :)

> There are a lot of very simple things Wine and samba
> need to work on -
> like ensuring that name mangling, or the mapping of
> windows attributes
> onto DOS extended attributes is consistant.

Very true.  Alexandre and some of the other Wine folks
have expressed the opinion that we shouldn't be doing
SMB for files anyway--the kernel should be doing it
all, so we can treat remote files the same as local
ones, and Linux programs and Windows ones will see
consistent behavior, all without straying from a GPL
license.

> Anyway, I've been recently pushing the NTLMSSP work
> available via
> ntlm_auth - you might want to look a the services it
> provides for some
> of the other areas you may trip across in your
> travels.

Thanks, I shall.
--Juan

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