I'm so glad ksmbd exists. It's such a lightweight, easy, simple way to interoperate. As someone who has been running OpenWRT & then other small embedded systems

I'm so glad ksmbd exists. It's such a lightweight, easy, simple way to interoperate. As someone who has been running OpenWRT & then other small embedded systems for a decade and a half, projects like Samba have been wonderful, but are massive everything-and-the-kitchen-sink (even when heavily stripped down) sized tools required to interoperate with the rest of the computing world. Being able to have a small kernel module built in radically increases the number of systems that can benefit from common interoperation, and it greatly eases the difficulty by being a targeted focused file-sharing implementation rather than the incredibly wide-ranging implementations we get in Samba. It's definitely been a bit of a challenge to make ksmbd happen. I want to be able to acknowledge problems, validate the fear people have had. But also, ksmbd feels like such a textbook example of what Steve Yeggie's thesis in Notes from the Mystery Magic Bus: > Software engineering has its own political axis, ranging from conservative to liberal. Starting from some definitions: > So we'll start with an operational definition of conservatism, from Jost et al.: "We regard political conservatism as an ideological belief system that is significantly (but not completely) related to motivational concerns having to do with the psychological management of uncertainty and fear." Today we see some validation of fear. There are problems. It's certainly an inconvenience for those relying on public shares functioning securely. Thusfar it's unclear how many people have been attacked via this, or what harm has been done: the scope of damage is unknown. But the conservative view is justified, in that there have been problems, ksmbd is causing those relying on it to have to update, or risk being attacked. Reciprocally though, I want to highlight how great this effort is. This is a novel new implementation of a complex protocol, that sits right at the hub of how systems can work together. There's a progressive, can do-ism here that is absolutely cherisable & excellent. That there are problems along the road is absolutely too something we should factor in, is a concern. It's up to everyone to take score, and to decide their alignment, what to go for & what not to. Even though today is a "bad" day for this enhancement, even though the road forward for it hasn't been without difficulty, I don't feel like it dooms the whole enterprise. Trying, to me, feels so worthwhile. The scope of impact, the actual harm of trying, seems so mild, and the doomsaying & fearmongering seems so overblown, to me.