Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/4] file-systems: Add support for mounting CIFS file systems

From: Richard Sent <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2024 14:22:35 -0400

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback! :)

> Any reason we ought to solve guest specially? Let's just assume that
> user and pass are always (possibly empty) strings. If you need to
> abstract over it, you could always make a procedure or something.

My reason for handling guest specifically is to try and match the
behavior of the userspace "mount.cifs" program as much as possible. That
program will parse options, and if it encounters the option "guest",
silently replace it with "user=,pass=" before initiating the mount
system call.

The kernel driver itself ignores the "guest" option, so unless we handle
it ourselves by inserting blank user and pass options, it wouldn't have
an effect.

If I understand what you're saying, we could have user and pass
variables that default to "" unless options includes e.g.
user=foo,pass=bar. That would diverge from mount.cifs's behavior though,
which is something I'm reluctant to do.

I don't know if not passing user or pass is identical to passing
user=,pass=, but if it's not then users would get confused reading
mount.cifs's documentation and trying to apply the same logic to their
OS declaration.

-- 
Take it easy, Richard Sent Making my computer weirder one commit at a
time.