Do you object to the full samba or to smb support at all? It might be a
  good idea to split samba and the libraries for other programs and the
  daemon/tools similiar to what we have for openldap. That should make it
  a lot less heavy as dependency as well.

I want to avoid large amounts of stuff that needs to be recompiled
often.  It seems I was having to rebuild samba and then gnome-vfs-smb
because of advisories a lot.

gnome vfs is pretty modular - I just want to not add a dependency on the
smb one and hence not build it and samba.