[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#525859: Bug#525859: smbclient: breaks BackupPC backups of shares with password

[Flavio Stanchina]

I'm CCing the BackupPC maintainer since it looks like this beast is going 
to bite him.

Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Flavio Stanchina (flavio at stanchina.net):
>> The smbclient man page says this about the -N option:
>>
>>   If a password is specified on the command line and this option is also
>>   defined the password on the command line will be silently ingnored and
>>   no password will be used.
>>
>> It said the same in smbclient 3.0.30, but the behavior was clearly
>> different: $PASSWD wasn't ignored.
> 
> I think that the current behaviour is correct and the former wasn't.
> 
> As the manpage says, using "-N" disables any password prompt, which
> can be easily expanded to "any mean to provide a password to the
> client is ignored".

I somewhat agree with this logic, but maybe a check with upstream is in 
order, just to make sure that this is expected and not a side effect of 
some other change.

> So, I'm afraid that backuppc should, in some way adapt its way to pass
> information to smbclient if it relies on using $PASSWD with "-N".

This is easily solved by just removing -N from the smbclient options in the 
BackupPC configuration, at least with smbclient 3.2 and 3.3. It should be 
tested with a smbclient < 3.2, but unfortunately I no longer have such a 
smbclient installation around, so I can't test right now.

Should I reassign this bug to BackupPC then?

-- 
Ciao, Flavio

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer