PATCH samba cache and read-ahead

[tridge at samba.org]

Amin,

I'm sorry to have taken so long to respond to your cache and
compression code.

To start with, I think what you are doing is very worthwhile! This is
the beginning of making Samba a really good CIFS proxy. I think there
are lot of interesting things that can be done with this (especially
things like optionally preacknowleding and coalescing writes).

I think it would be better if you created a new ntvfs/proxy/ module
though, instead of extending ntvfs/cifs/. I know the impact on the
cifs code isn't great yet (you have managed to contain it quite
well!), but I think the impact will grow as the proxy code gets more
sophisticated. 

I like to be able to use the cifs backend as a 1:1 pure pass through
module for testing purposes. For example, I can test whether a bug in
Samba4 can be reproduced when passing through the cifs module to a
w2k3 server. That tells me if the bug might be in the general parse
layer, or is in a ntvfs backend. While you have made all your changes
configurable, it will leave me with concerns about the usefulness of
this test.

So I'd suggest you copy the current ntvfs/cifs/ code (its only 1k
lines of C) and create ntvfs/proxy/ then modify it to suit your needs.

It may be that factoring out some common code makes sense as well, in
which case ntvfs/common/XXXXX.c might be a good place to put it.

Cheers, Tridge