libsmbclient and wine?

[Dan Kegel]

Hi folks,
it's often been said that wine can't use libsmbclient because
of license problems.   I'd like to look at that assumption a bit.

- What would wine like to use libsmbclient for, if it could?

- Would it suffice to just link it in to wineserver, or would
it need to be invoked directly by all sorts of dlls?

- Would we just use the system's libsmbclient (I hope so)
rather than trying to import its source?

Also, fwiw, I think the Samba guys are willing to multiplex
their listening daemon so Wine could handle incoming
named pipe requests if we want to.

Thanks,
Dan

[Kai Blin]

On Friday 23 October 2009 22:26:49 Dan Kegel wrote:
> Hi folks,
> it's often been said that wine can't use libsmbclient because
> of license problems.   I'd like to look at that assumption a bit.
> - What would wine like to use libsmbclient for, if it could?

Reading files from remote systems via UNC paths would come to mind, as well as 
NBT lookups.
> - Would it suffice to just link it in to wineserver, or would
>
> it need to be invoked directly by all sorts of dlls?

For the UNC path part, we need the logic in the redirector, which probably 
should be located in the wineserver. For the NBT part, this needs to be called 
from netapi32. We might be able to do nbt lookups via an LGPL library via 
winbind, though. The catch is of course that we'd have to have a running 
winbindd for that.
> - Would we just use the system's libsmbclient (I hope so)
>
> rather than trying to import its source?

We'd use the system library.
> Also, fwiw, I think the Samba guys are willing to multiplex
> their listening daemon so Wine could handle incoming
> named pipe requests if we want to.

Technically, we (wearing my Samba hat) will have to implement something 
that'll allow multiplexing the named pipe handling in one of our daemons. But 
from our last conversation on the subject, we seem to be ready to do that if 
needed.

Cheers,
Kai

[Rob Shearman]

2009/10/23 Dan Kegel :
> Hi folks,
> it's often been said that wine can't use libsmbclient because
> of license problems.   I'd like to look at that assumption a bit.
> -
>
> What would wine like to use libsmbclient for, if it could?
> -
>
> Would it suffice to just link it in to wineserver, or would
>
> it need to be invoked directly by all sorts of dlls?
> - Would we just use the system's libsmbclient (I hope so)
>
> rather than trying to import its source?
>
> Also, fwiw, I think the Samba guys are willing to multiplex
> their listening daemon so Wine could handle incoming
> named pipe requests if we want to.

libsmbclient would need to be linked into wineserver to properly
implement handles to named pipes that can be inherited by child
processes (and to be allow the handle to be accepted by all of the
functions that take a handle without large modifications).

However, having 3rd party code linked into the wineserver probably
gives many people the heebie-jeebies, given how critical the
wineserver is to allowing wine processes to continue to run and the
special rules of coding in the wineserver - not blocking, for one.