Re: Samba for Cygwin

[Charles Wilson <cwilson at ece dot gatech dot edu>]

Michael F. March wrote:

> 
>>>I happen to prefer the administration of Samba to traditional NT/2k
>>>shares. That is also why I use Apache under Win2K instead of
>>>IIS.
>>>
>>In this case, I'd just have to say "Get over it".  It sounds like an
>>a lot of work to port a file service layer on top of an *existing*
>>completely operational layer.  Administration of shares on Windows is
>>hardly complicated.
>>
>>The Windows OS doesn't implicitly support the http protocol.  So, you
>>can choose whatever web server you want.  Windows does implicitly
>>support the SMB protocol.  It invented the SMB protocol.  In this case
>>porting a UNIX application to Windows to support something that existed
>>on Windows first doesn't make much sense to me.
>>
>>I can just see the "Why is Samba so slow on Cygwin?" posts now.
>>
> 
> Even if no one ever used SAMBA for Cygwin, the port would not
> be in vain. I am certain that a SAMBA port would result in a 
> more hardier Cygwin POSIX environment for future ports of other
> apps that might experience the same porting issues if SAMBA was
> not ported first.


Sure, but why not expend that effort on a port that is USEFUL.  You'll 
still end up "hardening" Cygwin's POSIX stuff, and in the end you'll 
have a NEW ability, not a (slower) rehash of an EXISTING ability. 
(worse, that slower rehash will claim to support certain features that 
it really isn't capable of doing: "samba" implies a certain featureset, 
but not all of those will be possible on cygwin.  The intersection of 
the featureset of cygwin-samba and real-samba will change depending on 
(Win95 / Win98 / WinMe / WinNT / Win2K / WinXP ) + ( FAT / FAT32 / 
NTFS-NT4 / NTFS-NT5 ) + CYGWIN=(ntea / ntsec / smbntsec)


> I, for one, look forward to a
> SAMBA port.


I do not.  Join me in my nightmare:

"I just set up samba under cgywin on my Win95 machine.  It doesn't work. 
  Why not?"  (c.f. recent on-list discussion of "changing user name" on 
win9x).

Or this:

"I just set up samba 2.2 as a PDC on my WinMe machine. It doesn't work"

Or

"I can't get samba to run on my WinXP machine.  Of course, I can't get 
bash to run either, but that shouldn't affect samba, should it?" (since 
cygwin itself doesn't even work on XP yet...)

My solution for these and other problems: procmail any message 
containing samba and cygwin to the bitbucket.

--Chuck

 




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