[OpenAFS] kaserver deperecation, OpenAFS future, etc...

[Marcus Watts]

Jeff Blaine <jblaine@mitre.org> writes:
...
> future.  Your assessment is dead on.  Really.  Thank you.
...

I don't think there's any reason for anybody to resort to insults here.
A lot of people *are* surprised by your reasoning -- but I don't know
why you should be surprised - you obviously suspected you'd learn
something by asking what was happening with the future of openafs;
they've responded with their unvarnished opinions, and presumably now you
have a better idea.  If you want to refine that, you have
to provide details or at least constructive feedback, otherwise, well,
people actually do want help you, it's only human make assumptions, and
inadequate detail can leave an awful lot of dark scary territory...

You obviously believe kaserver has a future, and that's fine.  There
are in fact a number of admirable features in kaserver.  People here
will certainly appreciate knowing why you value it, and nobody here
wants to make your life harder than necessary.  What we might hope to
pick up at this point are:
	/1/ are there *other* people who still care actively about kaserver?
	/2/ should we make more active plans to support kaserver?

It would be helpful to all of us if you could outline exactly why you
*do* value kaserver -- and what makes your environment special that
makes the low security everybody else believes of des to be tolerable
for your environment.  I'm sure you have good reasons for this -- we
just need to know what they are so we don't respond out of ignorance.

Since one of the purposes of this list *should* be for people to identify
that things are a priority for them, what you did in mentioning that
kaserver is important to you *is* very welcome by everybody here.
That does not mean everybody else is going to adjust their idea of
the importance of kaserver - for that, you have to (somehow) make the
business case of how this best serves the openafs community.

The other main thing I'm sure we're all gathering out of this is
that the elders will probably need to make a bit more of an effort
to provide better documentation to people both in terms of the direction
that openafs is heading in, and probably also in terms of the support
people might get in this forum or elsewhere.

So I see we already have a "projects" page that talks about projects --
perhaps we need a more obvious "futures" page so people can make more
interesting plans.  Right now, our site is very much developer
oriented, since that's what most of us are, and it's got a certainly
cluttered wordiness - since developers think that way.

We do very little to educate people as to how to bring problems up in
the list - we've had other people come here already who clearly were
expecting "commercial" quality support from this list.  In fact, there
are people willing to do so, so we should make some effort to identify
those groups (& points of contacts are) so that people who want it can
find it.  We should also make clear what folks should expect from
*this* list.  This is of particular importance since some of those
people from who you could purchase commercial support are the very same
people who work hard to improve openafs, and participate gratis here.
It's not fair to expect those people to provide commercial support free
here, so we should make clear what you should bring to get value here,
and what you might hope to bring away from this list (and others).

This whole thread got inspired by a message by somebody complaining
about an actual problem with kaserver.  I hope that person
won't feel it's not worth providing more details about that problem.
Whether kaserver has a future, and whether kaserver has a bug are
two separate issues.

				-Marcus Watts