[Thunar-dev] samba

[Auke Kok]

Erlend Davidson wrote:
> On 14 Sep 2006, at 12:50, Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> 
>> Kresimir Spes wrote:
>>> is there a chance that the smb protocol (windows shares) will be
>>> implemented in thunar? I know the goal is to make a lightweight file
>>> manager, but this is a very important feature.
>>> a compromise would be to enable/disable smb:// at compile time.
>> If there's a compile time option, every distribution will enable  
>> it, so
>> whats the deal?
> Gentoo won't, and people who compile from source will have the choice.
> 
> Instead, what do you think of a network transparency API (which could  
> be disabled at compile time for extra-lightweightness) that people  
> can write plugins (samba, subversion, cvs) for.  Currently I think  
> only Konqueror has network transparency, so a gtk competitor might be  
> good.

It's all moot, and here is why:

Thunar can not solve this issue.

Why not? Because mounting filesystems (which smb/cifs is) requires underlying 
privileges and infrastructure that muck on kernel level.

Why do people think that implementing a specific way to do X (in this case, 
mount a samba share or browse it, which is basically the same) should beling in 
a filemanager?

Do we also implement browsing NFS shares? Coda? AFS? yourfavoriteotherfs?

All of these require certain credentials (sometimes very specific) and 
configuration options to be passed. Passed to what? How? How do you prevent it 
from doing bad things? sell your credit card info? play with your privates?

There is no common base for anyone except a few hacked cli tools now to do this 
in a structured way.

Thunar cannot solve this issue over and over again for every (X). Thunar is a 
file manager, not a mount daemon for exotic filesystems.

Something lying on top of HAL would be much more suitable.

Once that problem gets solved for linux, it will be solved for *everyone* and 
thunar just has to implement the 'generic' method to mount a (removable!) media.


if you want smb:// to work in thunar, then provide a desktop-free global 
solution that is independent of GUI and only needs (basic feature to be able to 
mount X-type filesystems).

Assking the thunar developers to write such a beast in Thunar is like asking 
the KDE developers to write a decent kernel. You don't do that. Trust me ;)

Until such a project exists, it is unlikely that thunar will ever show smb:// 
filesystems on the fly.


Auke