Samba4 Posix NTVFS questions

[Jeremy Allison]

On Sun, Nov 07, 2004 at 11:42:47PM +0100, Gémes Géza wrote:

> Then how in your view should Samba4 act when contacted by a Posix and by 
> a Windows client?
> Give one the system EA based Posix ACLs, and the other the user EA based 
> NT ACLs? Or will be both presented with the same NT ACLs, remaining the 
> Posix clients job to translate them to Posix ones?
> Another question: How would you treat the Take ownership NT right?

I'm not saying that a Samba4 server shouldn't implement NT
ACLs and NT semantics as closely as possible, of course we
should, that is our purpose. I'm saying that we shouldn't take
the things that we have to do to support Windows clients and
add them into the POSIX spec. 

We should present POSIX ACLs to POSIX clients and Windows ACLs
to Windows clients. It is a matter of administrator policy how
to map between them - we can give a choice easily (we already
have an imperfect mapping) - or whether to keep them separate.

What I am saying is don't add NT semantics to POSIX. If we want
to exend POSIX we should add the capability to implement such
things in an extended way (the Linux plug-in facility for example)
but not tie them to Windows semantics. Remember, Windows semantics
are not a standard, not written down and change on new server
releases.

The NFSv4 ACLs are *based* on NT ACLs but they are *NOT*
NT ACLs. They are differnet from the semantics that Windows
servers implement. Great - now we have two quite similar but
actually different ACL mechanisms. It's this trap I want to avoid
for POSIX.

Jeremy.