On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 08:00:35AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> One issue I have had with accessing coda over samba is that samba
> seems to open files for read/write, even if the underlying operation
> on Windows should have been read only (i.e., if Windows is sensible,
> which I realize is a counter-factual hypothesis).  This results in

Actually that is not Samba's fault. The Coda client work on Win9x and
WinNT/2000/XP has shown that applications are quite sloppy and often
open files read-write when only reading.

One reason is that there _seems_ to be no way to change the attributes
given just a filename, and since chown/chgrp/chmod/utimes need to write
the application has to get a filedescriptor with read/write permissions.

Also many apps are modifying parts of the file to set 'locks' (i.e. this
user/machine is editing this file), or even update access timestamps
embedded in the files (audit log?).

Then there is the sloppy programming. I guess there are so many exotic
flags that can be passed to open, that programmers just get a 'default
set that seems to work' and use that in all cases.

Jan