CIFS will be strategic in some settings, but not included in kernel

[George Hunt]

I wasn't really thinking that you folks doing the core software would have
time for a UI of any kind right now. I think I could create an Activity
which would be obsoleted once a WebDAV solution is in place.

I've been wanting to create an Activity that would add value and bridge the
MS-linux gap. I discovered that pyNeighborhood is open sourced, written in
python, uses gtk, runs on the XO, discovers a diverse MS  network, and in my
opinion has an acceptable UI.

All that is missing is browsing the selected share and fetching a file to
the journal, inbound, and pasting a clipboard item (from the journal) to a
mounted network folder, outbound. I'd like to speak for taking advantage of
what's already written, and available in the larger linux community. This
seems like low hanging fruit.

I'd be willing to roll my own kernel, with CIFS enabled for development
purposes.  But I don't see how the wider community could review my work or
how my new Activity could make a contribution to the wider effort without a
decision to enable CIFS in future builds.

WebDav is new to me, and interesting. I'm thinking of the kids in city
schools, where a parent has an XP desktop, and printer. Is it your idea that
WebDAV client would exist on the XO and the parent would download a WebDAV
server, and install it on his/her XP machine?

Is there someone with WebDAV experience and enthusiasm who I could
correspond with?

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2008/8/24 George Hunt <georgejhunt at gmail.com>:
> > Two factors tip the balance between bloat and functionality in favor of
> > including CIFS file system in the kernel.
>
> First, for any network FS to actually be usable we would need to do
> significant work on the UI. Including the smb client code is a trivial
> step, doing a good quality UI is not.
>
> And if we are going to include a network FS, there are other
> alternatives for this. For the usage scenario you are mentioning
> WebDAV is a much better fit, suited for ocassional file sharing, built
> on the http stack, and can traverse networks over nat and proxies.
>
> > Not including CIFS in the XO limits future and unforseen use
> unnecessarily.
>
> Let's rewrite that to 'standardised network file systems'.
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20080825/0ab8b61c/attachment.html>