Fair enough, but if there's a great amount of dependency on the Samba backend and the fear of ripple effects is a factor, perhaps they shouldn't have messed with it in the first place...? And if their testing is so extensive, how did something this basic slip through? I mean, writing files. It's step 2 after checking that it reads them.
I work against this NAS drive from 3 different computers and I've had to use Boot Camp as a fallback due to this issue. "Windows to the rescue", does that sound right?
I'm just giving you the reason for companies taking a while to release updates, not the insanity behind Apple's engineering teams. Most likely they didn't mess with it in the first place, only compiling the old stable Samba release and that's it. They didn't do much to optimize it for the OS X. It's just easier to patch and support older versions than new. Unfortunately, in Apple's world, it can be very old.
Their current smbd version is Version 3.0.28a-apple (which was released on March, 8 2008). That's old. Samba is already at 3.5.2 now.
Other than the dependence issues, I honestly don't know why Apple hasn't updated the Samba backend to 3.4/3.5.
Hell, even Bash shell is 3.2, which was released back in 2007 and we're at 4.1
The only thing that makes sense to me is that Apple didn't want to spend time updating the command line tools for Snow Leopard because their main focus was for the kernel overhaul/64bit. Does it mean that 10.7 will have new stuff, not really. Apple is also supposely working on the next gen file system as well. So there's a lot of of things going around and Apple's main OS X teams are screatched more than ever, with the iPhoneOS since Apple don't tend to hire a lot of engineers at same time.
Update: Read the previous poster's post. As you can see, external factors is also an issue. Apple doesn't have to change anything between updates and Samba client can get broken because of incompatibility issues with Samba servers.
