Re: We want to join the developement

[Marco Gerards]

"anand narayan vidwansa" <anandvid@rediffmail.com> writes:

Hi,

I've noticed that bug-hurd wasn't in the CC again and added it again
(There are more people there who can help you with this).

[...]

> > Why do you want to re-invent the wheel? Samba can do that job, right?
> > Or do you want to implement it as a filesystem?  In that case you can
> > use libsmbclient for accessing CIFS shares and use a Hurd library
> > like
> >libnetfs to implement the filesystem.
> >
> >It should be really easy to do.
> >
> > Can you please give more information about what you want to do, etc?
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Marco
> >
> Hello sir,
>                   The topic "An implementation of CIFS on GNU Hurd" is
> mentioned on GNU Task List on this webpage
> ://www.gnu.org/prep/tasks_5.html#SEC5.

You are right, I forgot GNU also has a todo list with GNU/Hurd related
items.

>                   We dont know much about the implementation details
> about this matter but we got an idea from this webpage.

I think I can answer many of your questions about this, but please
keep in mind that I didn't add this todo item (possibly no-one on this
mailinglist, although it is certainly something that needs to be done!).

>                      We know SAMBA can work out things related to
> CIFS/SMB but i think it is not avaliable on GNU Hurd.

Actually, samba works on GNU/Hurd, but it needs some work.  I've
tested this (ok, just libsmbclient, but it shouldn't be too had to
make everything work) and didn't notice any problems at all, I just
can't remember the samba version, perhaps it was version 3.

I think the task doesn't mean a reimplementation of samba (I think
there are more useful things to do than this), but writing the smbfs
filesystem like Linux has.  The advantage of the Hurd above linux in
this case is that you can use userspace libraries.  Just use
libsmbclient for the network communication.

>                          May be we want to work out instead of SAMBA
> or may be we can port SAMBA for GNU Hurd but we are not sure
> exactly.

I think it is better to make samba work on GNU/Hurd and perhaps write
smbfs for it.  This also requires sending patches in for both the Hurd
and samba and communicating both with the samba and the Hurd people.

If you will use libsmbclient and netfs as I have mentioned before you
will have not much difficulties at all.  Perhaps it would be nice to
check how close the libsmbclient interfaces are to POSIX and if it is
thread safe, it is nice for both the Hurd and samba if it is thread
safe.

>                              If you think this is not a good idea to
> work on for Hurd,can u please suggest some more topics we can work on
> in case of GNU Hurd?

There are more todo lists related to the Hurd in case you think the
Smb/CIFS work isn't interesting after all:

https://savannah.gnu.org/pm/?group=hurd
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/~checkout~/hurd/hurd/tasks?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/plain
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/~checkout~/hurd/hurd/TODO?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/plain

If you don't understand what the tasks in the last two lists are
about, feel free to ask on the mailinglist. :)

And ofcourse you can have a look yourself and see what you think is
missing and we can talk about that.

Thanks,
Marco