>From previous comments by Nokia, the reason that SMB support is being
dropped is that Gnome VFS support is being dropped, and that was how SMB
was being supported in the previous versions.
OK, I can understand that: I always felt that userspace was the wrong
place to manage file systems anyway.
Also in previous comments, Nokia has indicated that they feel that
adding support for things like SMB/CIFS can be handled by the community.
OK, fair enough, but then here's what I see Nokia needs to do in order
to enable that:
1) Provide a reasonable means to supply kernel modules against the stock
kernel as supplied by Nokia in the official repositories. "The
community" cannot provide anything if the next update from Nokia will
break everything by removing the needed kernel modules.
I would suggest that for in-tree kernel modules there needs to be a
means by which the community can identify what modules are of interest,
and those modules can be added to a list of modules that will be
automatically built when a new kernel is build, and each module then be
packaged as a separate package which can be added as a dependency of any
package that needs it.
For out of tree modules, there needs to be a good way "the community"
can provide a package to Nokia such that the out-of-tree module can also
be built and made available.
2) Provide (AND DOCUMENT) hooks into the file manager and file selector
dialogs for the following events:
a) enumerate file systems
b) select an enumerated file system.
Such that a user provided module can add potential new file systems to
the file manager dialog, and interact with the user when one of those
file systems is selected.
Then the community can write code to add file systems to the tablet.
Use case 1: Home user with windows network.
User wants to view a media file served from a Windows PC sharing a
folder via CIFS (Microsoft networking) as \\PC\MEDIA.
User opens the Media Player on the Device.
User opens the File Selector.
File Selector lets all Modules know a file system enumeration is in
progress.
CIFS Module enumerates all available CIFS servers (in this case, the
Windows PC), and adds them to the File Selector
File Selector shows something like:
N900
Videos
Audio
Other
CIFS
PC
MEDIA
User selects PC\MEDIA. File selector informs CIFS Module.
CIFS Module prompts user for any needed information (user to log in as,
password).
CIFS Module saves any data needed for later.
CIFS Module mounts \\PC\MEDIA and informs File Selector where that is.
File Selector shows the user the files.
User selects file
Media Player loads file and plays it.
NOTE: It may be that the CIFS module handles enumeration of file systems
in the background, and even automatically mounts known file systems
without user interaction.
This could be extended to NFS (discovery via Zeroconf), SSHFS, or
anything else.
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