Re: New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

Re: New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

[Steve French]

OK - good progress on filling the requirement for Windows ME/9x support 
which seems to be the most common reason for still needing smbfs based 
on various email responses on this thread (if we can get this work 
finished up fast, it will avoid some double maintainence).

CIFS (in the cifs.git tree) can now handle not just mounts to Windows ME 
(and probably Windows 9x), but readdir and enough of lookup.   Finishing 
up the remainder should go fast (OpenX instead of NTCreateX is the main 
piece left).

Of course finding Windows 95, Windows 98, and OS/2 servers is a little 
harder than it sounds...although scripting a subset of the functional 
tests that should work should be pretty easy.

I will also put a version of the source that will compile at least as 
far back as 2.6.9 up on the project page within a few days.

Re: New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

[Hal Wigoda]

is a maintainer still needed?
and if so, what are the qualifications?
hal wigoda
chicago

Re: New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

[Andi Kleen]

Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> writes:

> Since Urban Widmark was not active for some time, and I didn't have any 
> success trying to reach him, it seems we need a new maintainer for the 
> smb filesystem in the Linux kernel.
> 
> Is there anyone who both feels qualified and wants to become the new 
> maintainer?

One way would be to just deprecate and later drop it and let people
use cifs instead which is maintained. It only doesn't work with
some extremly old smb servers which are probably not very numerous
anymore.

-Andi

Re: New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

[Steven Rostedt]

On Sun, 2005-08-21 at 22:26 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> writes:
> 
> > Since Urban Widmark was not active for some time, and I didn't have any 
> > success trying to reach him, it seems we need a new maintainer for the 
> > smb filesystem in the Linux kernel.
> > 
> > Is there anyone who both feels qualified and wants to become the new 
> > maintainer?
> 
> One way would be to just deprecate and later drop it and let people
> use cifs instead which is maintained. It only doesn't work with
> some extremly old smb servers which are probably not very numerous
> anymore.

Or you could deprecate it and later drop it and when people complain,
you just found your new maintainer :-)

-- Steve

New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

[Adrian Bunk]

Since Urban Widmark was not active for some time, and I didn't have any 
success trying to reach him, it seems we need a new maintainer for the 
smb filesystem in the Linux kernel.

Is there anyone who both feels qualified and wants to become the new 
maintainer?

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

Re: New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

[Andrew Morton]

Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> wrote:
>
> Since Urban Widmark was not active for some time, and I didn't have any 
> success trying to reach him, it seems we need a new maintainer for the 
> smb filesystem in the Linux kernel.
> 
> Is there anyone who both feels qualified and wants to become the new 
> maintainer?
> 

Yes, it's a poor situation.  That driver seems to have quite a few problems.

I was hoping that by now we could simply deprecate smbfs and tell people to
use CIFS, but I'm not sure that CIFS is ready for that yet.

Steve, what's your take?  Does CIFS offer a 100% superset of smbfs
capabilities?

Thanks.

Re: New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

[Dave Jones]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 12:46:57PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
 > Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> wrote:
 > >
 > > Since Urban Widmark was not active for some time, and I didn't have any 
 > > success trying to reach him, it seems we need a new maintainer for the 
 > > smb filesystem in the Linux kernel.
 > > 
 > > Is there anyone who both feels qualified and wants to become the new 
 > > maintainer?
 > 
 > Yes, it's a poor situation.  That driver seems to have quite a few problems.
 > 
 > I was hoping that by now we could simply deprecate smbfs and tell people to
 > use CIFS, but I'm not sure that CIFS is ready for that yet.
 > 
 > Steve, what's your take?  Does CIFS offer a 100% superset of smbfs
 > capabilities?

A while ago, we disabled it in Fedora kernels, and told people
"Use CIFS instead".  There were a whole range of Windows variants
that it couldn't talk to.  Maybe the situation has improved since,
but at the time, it was bad enough that we had to switch smbfs back on.

		Dave

Re: New maintainer needed for the Linux smb filesystem

[Adrian Bunk]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 08:01:57PM -0500, Steven French wrote:
>...
> I don't mind fixing any major smbfs bugs that are found as needed, the code
> is not hard to follow, but I would rather focus on the three current cifs
> priorities:
>...

It sounds as if you would be a great choice as new smbfs maintainer - 
you know both the protocols involved and the Linux kernel.

Noone expects big feature additions to the smbfs code, maintainership 
consists of:
- reviewing patches
- handling bugs (the 16 open bugs in the kernel Bugzilla give a rough
  impression of what problems people face)

cifs might be the future, but until it supports a superset of smbfs
users require smbfs - and a good smbfs makes their life easier.

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed