Hi Eric, you have been able to understand most of what I have wanted to 
express and thanks for making them so clear for Charles.

What I had in mind is something like Windows File Sharing, the only
difference being that users should be able to share files across the
internet since CIFS is based on TCP/IP.

The purpose of implementing it in Squeak is to make Squeak even more
powerful and capable of interacting with various other OSs like Windows,
Linux, other unices that support CIFS. If we depend on the native
implementation we will loose out on platform independence.

Also it would be great lets say for example for you to peek into my code and
change it (based on permissions and locking) while I am working on something
else, lets say you are my mentor and would like to instruct me real time
along with code changes.

Please visit the following sites:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/networking/cifs/
http://jcifs.samba.org/

Regards.


--
Mayuresh A Kathe
Think Different. Think Better.
mayuresh at vsnl.com

----------
>From: "Eric Arseneau" <eat at IBM.NET>
>To: <squeak at cs.uiuc.edu>
>Subject: RE: Common Internet File System?
>Date: Sun, Feb 13, 2000, 8:33 PM
>

> Hey Chuck, long time no talk dude,
>
>>it depends on what you mean by common internet file system...
> Tha ability to share files between users.
>
>>Sharing code between machines without filing-out and in requires a shared
>>common code base, an object repository, like CSV for Unix/Linux or PVCS for
>>Windows & OS2, to check-out code, (class and method definitions) so that
>>collaborators won't clobber changes you might be making and to check-in the
>>code when you're done unit testing.
>
> I strongly disagree with you here Chuck.  I think one way that has not been
> explored is the peer to peer approach.  What if I had an image that I wanted
> to synchronize with someone else's image.  One guy could "publish" his image
> for a while and people "connect" to it.  The connecting user would get a
> complete catalog of what is available and different and be able to choose
> what he or she would want.  Think of the cool possibilities of doing this.
> You could have one central server that people connect to and keep it up to
> date, in this way sharing code with many people.  One person could pass off
> objects and code to another and get them to be able to see the code and
> maybe experiment on their own.  The coolest one is as follows:  How many
> times have you tried to file out code from one image, gone into the other,
> and figured out you forgot something ?  Would it not be much better to have
> the two local images be able to talk to each other and be able to get what
> you need !!!
>
> Using this technique across dialects would be REALLY cool as well.  The shit
> I went and am going through to get the SIF stuff to work across multiple
> dialects.
>
>>That how Visual Smalltalk Enterprise and ENVY/Developper do it and
>>that how its
>>done for every other document type in addition to code. Don't even
>>think it can
>>be done any other way. They have all been tried over the past
>>three decades and
>>this is the _one_ way that has survived...)
>
> See above.
>
>>If you meant something else by "Common Internet File System" then
>>I may have
>>been off-base and pointing you to the wrong things. (Since the
>>file system is
>>an OS function, we're pretty much stuck with the ones installed on the
>>underlying platforms.)
>
> That's his point I think, add extensions to Squeak to allow it to support
> CIFS.
>
> Answering his original question:
>
> I think that it would be cool.  The only thing that really bugs me is that I
> am sure that most OSs will add "drivers" to support this, and Squeak will be
> able to just use them as other drives.  I think that implementing them at
> the OS level makes better sense since this allows all applications to be
> able to use them.  At the Squeak level, then only Squeak code can use it and
> I think this is not as useful.
>
> Make sense ?
>
>