[AFS3-std] Re: New version of the 64-bit time I-D (-03)

[Andrew Deason]

On Fri, 2 Sep 2011 13:39:13 +0100
Simon Wilkinson <simon@sxw.org.uk> wrote:

> Apologies for not raising this earlier, but I have a small question
> about naming in the 64 bit time draft. I'd really like to use these
> times for on-the-wire values in rxgk - in particular for token times.
> Does it seem like a layering violation for something at the RX level
> to depend on types with AFS in their name?

Are they used in an XDR stream in rxgk? My thoughts on this are that the
types described in afs3-type-time are XDR types and aren't really for
use in e.g. general packet headers; so if you're just using a 64-bit
wide field in a packet or something, these types shouldn't be used
anyway.

But either way, I think we need to be reasonable about using the exact
same types everywhere; we can use the same format without saying the
same exact type name. That is, it seems pretty simple to just say
something like field TokenTimeFoo is a 64-bit integer, and it represents
time in exactly the same format as AFS does with AFSTimeAbs64. That's
what we would be doing for unix time values if we were using unix time;
we don't just say the field is a time_t, we usually just say it's an
X-bit integer that works like time in POSIX. Similar thing here, I
think.

At the end of the day, they're just names so it doesn't matter very
much. But the draft as it stands right now is very AFS-centric and
contains a lot of discussion of AFS-only issues, so changing that while
still having the draft make sense seems nontrivial.

-- 
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net