Re: MC with SMB as VFS

[Zdzislaw Sliwinski <dishlav research canon com au>]

Hi Pavel,

> There is already some support for SMB shares in MC, but it's implemented
> in such "hacky" way that it's disabled by default.  If I understand
> correctly (sorry if I'm wrong), you are not even aware about that
> implementation. 
Nope, I wasn't aware of that. I looked at the available FAQs and docos and 
found no mentioning of samba, or SMB.

> 1) Use samba library.  The problem is that such thing doesn't exist (it
> didn't last time checked).  Contribute it to the Samba team.  Make MC use
> it when it's installed.
>
> 2) Make MC run "smbclient" and parse its output.  May be not so reliable,
> but no changes in other software are required (hopefully).  This is how
> FiSH (FIles transferred over SHell) works.
Actually, I thought just from the user's point of view, not how I (or whoever 
else) would do it. I must admit that I'm not an expert on samba, but I use 
smbclient from time to time and its interface is very much like ftp's. And 
since ftpfs is there, and the usage is like:
/#ftp:[!][user[:pass] ]machine[:port][remote-dir]

I thought that we could have something like this:
/#smb:[user[:pass] ]machine[remote-dir], or
/#smb:[user[:pass] ]samba-share, or maybe something completely different 
(like FAR's network browser plugin for example).

I find your proposals very interesting and if I was to choose one of them I 
would go for 1)... who knows, maybe I will (no commitment here though...)


All the best
dishlav