[AFS3-std] Standardization of GetCapabilties RPCs for AFS3 client and services

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

[Dropping afs3-protocol; I assume by now people know about this list]

On Saturday, February 25, 2006 09:53:10 PM -0500 Derrick J Brashear 
<shadow@dementia.org> wrote:

> it exists because some purist decided it was bad for clients to identify
> themselves.

We can debate some other time whether it is good or bad for clients to 
identify themselves and then have servers have a huge list of exceptions. 
I will note that there are examples from real life lending support to both 
sides of that argument.

However, the present discussion is not about servers changing their 
behavior depending on what client they see, or in fact about changing their 
behavior at all.  It's not even about servers identifying what their 
behavior will be.  It's about servers telling clients how to behave, 
something no amount of which could have solved the problem that magic plus 
solved.


> if you can't understand why not, then we have an unbridgeable
> gulf.

What you are actually saying is "If you don't already understand and agree 
with my position, then you must be broken, and I'm not even going to bother 
trying".  This attitude is not conducive to successful consensus building. 
How can you possibly we know we have an unbridgeable gulf when you haven't 
even made an attempt to find out how far apart we are?

Last week I attended a meeting in which a number of SSH and SNMP experts 
spent a very productive two days developing a common understanding so we 
could have meaningful discussion related to developing an SSH-based 
security model for SNMPv3.  I bet we aren't as far apart as they were.


Before I can make any more substantive comments on this issue, I need to 
try to understand the problem Jeff is actually trying to solve.  It would 
be very helpful if he and/or you could explain what scenario you are trying 
to solve, and why this is the right way to solve it.  It would also help if 
you would just explain your position, instead of making oblique references 
to unrelated issues and expecting us to guess what analogy you're trying to 
draw.

-- Jeff