CRLF/LF Conversion

[stefan_kappey at trw-iscs.com]

Hi everybody!

I hope that you are not already "pissed off" of all the crlf/lf conversion
discussion between dos and unix ;-)


Concerning that topic I have a question / suggestion:

This is what we have:
   We are using a Win NT 4.0 Server with Win95 clients. Additionally we have a
   Sun (Solaris 2.5) running in the same network. To access the Sun in character
   mode we use a terminal emulation (Reflection). We do not access the Sun from
   the clients in GUI mode.

This is what we do:
   We are supporting a software with a huge amount of single files (more than
   7000 (7K) files!) running/laying on the UNIX machine. When we receive a patch
   we have to have to compare the patched file with the one on our Sun and then
   add the patched lines into it. Therefore we ftp the files to the Win clients
   and then use a windows tool (vdifmrg) to compare and patch the files. This
   tool creates a new file with the merged output. After all this we ftp those
   files back to the Sun.

   We thought that when using Samba we get rid of the "ftp steps" and simply
   access those files directly on the Unix machine. This works except of the
   generation of the output file because this is saved in DOS-format on the Unix
   file system. So we would have to convert those generated files manually to
   make them work. If we have to do this we prefer to use the former way.

This is what we would like to have:
   Well, it is very simple to guess what we want to have: a CRLF/LF conversion
   ;-) and I know of all your thoughts and concerns about this. Because I read a
   lot of articles from the Samba web site especially the
   CRLF-LF-Conversions.txt file.
   But for us, it would be great to have a PERMANENT file conversion because we
   only "access" ASCII files. If we have to transfer binaries we will use the
   good old ftp protocol.


What do you think about this? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel for us?
Is it possible to implement this conversion into Samba or does anybody has
another, perhaps better, solution for us?


Best regards,

   Stefan Kappey
   TRW ISCS GmbH
   GERMANY