* Daniel Lawson <daniel(a)meta.net.nz> [2004-06-30 22:27]:
I don't think you can compare these at all: KDE and GNOME are willingly doing so; noone is forcing them.
That makes it *worse* in my opinion.
Well, that was my point, too.
Samba is the same thing as WINE: intended to shoehorn Linux into places where Windows rules.
And for situations where you want to run a heterogenous network, that's fine and dandy. I don't consider the client OS to count however. There is no real reason we shouldn't have windows boxes authing via NIS or LDAP or whatever we want, and whatever distributed file system running to serve them network content. Why is the standard approach to this "Run samba, put up with the inconsistencies, and just hope the samba dev team can play catchup quicker than their opposition can cheat them".
In the beginning, there was a large Windows network, with many clients and several servers. Into this world, the fresh new Linux server was born. What would you do -- shoehorn a new technology onto 100 machines so they can talk to the new kid, or shoehorn the client technology onto the new kid so it can talk to the 100 old machines? Ideally, you'd deploy a double file serving protocol setup, with the clients being replaced by ones talking the new protocol as they get phased out. Maybe once you have 60% of the clients talking the new protocol, you will think about an interoperability solution to let the old clients talk the new protocol also. Or maybe you'll wait until the penetration is more like 80% and you can afford to sweep out the rest of the old clients at once. Another problem: I've never heard of any reasonably usable networked FS for Windows besides SMB/CIFS. Do you know more than me? If you do, can you name a few large sites that have been successfully running it so my (ficticious) PHB would feel safe to give the go-ahead to implement it? Regards, -- Aristotle "If you can't laugh at yourself, you don't take life seriously enough."