Mind if I read your code?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 03:07:41PM -0800, Juan Lang wrote:
> --- 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.

Then what you really want is Samba4, and the client library that is
attached to it.  

> > 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'm not sure about NetBIOS servers - nobody really writes these today,
but I don' think you really need that.

> 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 :)

we have libnss_wins, and even added WINS to winbind so IRIX can do
name resoluiton via our client code.  I don't like the idea of winbind
becoming an 'everyting' deamon, but I can imagine it handling browse
lists at least...

(And for things like browse lists, you do want some machanism that can
cache etc)

> > 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.

Going via POSIX is suboptimal, you do get much better semantics going
direct to CIFS.  It would be good if we could work out some way that
could happen.

Andrew Bartlett