[linux-cifs-client] First alpha of new cifs-utils package

[Jeff Layton]

On Mon, 8 Feb 2010 10:14:08 -0500
Jeff Layton <jlayton at samba.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:05:48 -0500
> Jeff Layton <jlayton at samba.org> wrote:
> 
> > Lately we've had a number of "security" fire drills that have required
> > us to patch all of the previous samba branches. This is a major pain...
> > 
> > Right now, the cifs utilities in samba (mount.cifs and cifs.upcall) are
> > only really there as a matter of convenience. They're not really part
> > of samba in any material way, and really ought to be something we
> > package separately.
> > 
> > Decoupling the cifs utils from samba would be easier for distro
> > packagers too. No need to do an entire samba release if there's a
> > mount.cifs problem and vice versa...
> > 
> > I'd like to start splitting those tools out into a separate cifs-utils
> > git tree and tarball. I'll probably still host those at samba.org for
> > the forseeable future.
> > 
> > The main stumbling block at this point is the fact that cifs.upcall
> > links in some libsmbclient objects during the build. Before we can
> > separate them we'll have to make cifs.upcall not do that. I may need
> > some help and guidance from people better versed in krb5 programming.
> > 
> > Anyone have thoughts or objections to this plan?
> > 
> 
> Over the weekend, I did a first pass on separating out the cifs
> utilities into a separate cifs-utils package. The result so far is here:
> 
>     git://git.samba.org/jlayton/cifs-utils.git
> 
> ...it builds and actually seems to work. I took the approach of copying
> entire files from samba for a lot of the functions we need. cifs.upcall
> is now a lot smaller since we're not sucking in all of those unneeded
> objects from the libsmbclient build.
> 
> There's probably still quite a bit of work to be done with respect to
> autoconf, and cifs.upcall can probably be shrunk even further if we
> drop some more routines that we don't actually need.
> 
> It's not quite ready for a release yet, but it's usable enough for
> people to play with -- let's call this "0.1-alpha".
> 
> I don't have a lot of experience in building packages from scratch like
> this, and I'm sure there's stuff I've missed. I'd appreciate some
> review, testing and patches for anything that's broken.
> 
> Eventually, we'll probably want to promote this package to a "top
> level" git tree on samba.org, but for now it can live in my git area
> there.
> 
> Thanks!

I've gone ahead and put up a simple webpage for cifs-utils as well:

    http://samba.org/~jlayton/cifs-utils/

...and went ahead and cut a first release and dropped it into the
directory there. I've decided to change the version numbering scheme a
bit and plan to make the first release "4.0". Since we're splitting off
from samba3, starting the versions with a higher number than 3.x seems
like it'll make it easier for people packaging samba. That should help
ensure the new packages supercede any packages based on the samba 3.x
releases. I'm flexible on this however, so if anyone thinks this'll be
a problem, let me know.

Thanks,
-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton at samba.org>