[Samba] What's happening to "strip dot"?

[James Wilkinson]

Hello, all you happy people.

I notice from the 2.2.5 release notes that the "strip dot" parameter
has been deprecated. I haven't been able to find out why it has been
deprecated: was no-one else using it? Is there some architectural
reason why it's being dropped?

We use Samba 2.2 on an IBM RS/6000 running AIX. This machine is the
principal database server for the company: the users telnet or ssh
in to run programs against it. This means that we are using Samba to
access existing Unix files, not as a drop-in NAS device to replace an
NT box.

Some of these files end in a dot (e.g. a directory called "U.S.A.").
Without the "strip dot" functionality, it is very difficult to access
the files in this directory. These names are based on key fields in
the database, which makes them difficult to change.

Of course, I can create symlinks to handle this, but it is not as clean
from the users' point of view: they still get to see two directories,
and have to be trained not to open one of them.

Can anyone point me to any discussions on this?

Curiously,

James