Disabling of "wide links" violates "principle of least surprise"

[Alain Knaff (Samba Lists)]

On 09/05/10 19:13, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 02:10:23PM +0200, Volker Lendecke wrote:
>>
>> Just to make sure I understand you right: You want Samba to
>> report and follow existing wide links but not allow setting
>> them at all from the client if wide links are enabled? This
>> might indeed be a compromise. Jeremy should comment here.
> 
> Actually we already considered and rejected this option
> when we were discussing what to do.

Could you post an URL to this discussion, so that I can view the reasons
brought forth?

> It breaks unix extensions
> in that all of a sudden parts of them don't work.

But this could happen anyways. One example is the read-only share case,
another one is a directory to which the user has no (Unix) write rights.

> Whereas the
> wide links option has been there for a long time and is well
> understood.

Why would "being well understood" favor breaking it? I'd rather tend to
do the opposite. Indeed if a behavior of a "well understood" option
suddenly changes, that means that the previous understanding has now
suddenly become wrong, making samba less dependable.

> The choice was to make 2 options incompatible,
> or subtly break the internals of one option that a lot of
> people use to store their home directories. Making 2 options
> incompatible is a better choice (IMHO).
> 
> Jeremy.

Sorry to be so blunt, but I still get the impression that all this is
more about ego than about "To serve our users best".

Regards,

Alain