Architcecture for winbindd client character conversion.

[simo]

On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 14:03 -0500, Gerald (Jerry) Carter wrote:
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> Jeremy Allison wrote:
> 
> >> It's not the nss plugin job to mess with locales.
> > 
> > Did you read my proposal ? Winbindd will mess with
> > the character set conversion, nss will merely tell
> > winbindd what character set the current client is
> > using.
> 
> Just to mention a point, Jeremy's proposal assumes a
> similar boundary for string conversion as we use for
> incoming CIFS packets.  Instead of the wire being the
> boundary, the incoming winbindd pipe request is the
> boundary.
> 
> And while it may be a really bad idea for Unix to allow
> per user locale settings, the fact is that it does.
> All this discussion really just seems hinged on the
> point that it is a bad idea to do this.  But we have fixed
> so many issues where it was a bad idea in Unix/Windows,
> what makes this one different?

The difference is that in this case we can't fix nothing really by
allowing multiple charsets per session.

The filesystem is one, and if you allow people to login with different
locales it means you are allowing people to make a mess in the
filesystem where some people write files in utf8, some other in Japanase
charsets and some others in iso8859-15.

Backup programs may fail or restore things in the wrong locale or just
mess up file names as you don't know what is right or wrong.

Systems where users use different locales at the same time are just
broken.

It is ok (is it really in 2007 when utf8 is available?) to allow people
to chose their machine locale, but allowing them to use multiple locales
on the same machine is just asking for troubles.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer
email: idra at samba.org
http://samba.org