deprecating smbmount ?

[Guenter Kukkukk]

Not only dedicated to the famous samba team and Steve French doing the cifs development
- also to the maintainers, which now already started to ship "stripped" versions whithout former information, i.e FC5

...supporting anchient systems is always the most ugly work for developers - when facing the "bright new future"...

It's more worse, to not (heavily) informing the customers/users about a break 'in availability' of a feature/product.

Not supporting the smbfs related samba tools anymore is one area - deploying smbfs or not is another one.
Possibly both should hit the same timeframe.

cifsfs is the successor of smbfs. (with all it's related samba tools)

Sorry, til now I was not aware of the ongoing process inside cifs supporting older SMB systems.

Great - cifs is maintained and smbfs is not.

So I built one of the new (older SMB-dialects aware) cifs myself -  great success with anchient OS/2
with minor glitches til now. (thx to sfrench)

Being really shure, that Steve French will do his best to also support anchient systems, I suggest the
following:

  - all the new (supporting old SMB dialects related stuff) in cifs should mature in a way, that cifs could (easily) replace smbfs!
  - THEN the samba team should inform its users about 'dropping smbfs related tools', allowing some months timeframe
  - THEN the (RPM ...) distro maintainers should inform their customers/users ... and follow the same time frame

Best wishes.
Guenter