[OpenAFS-devel] Re: OpenAFS: conventions for new @sys? (rs_aix43 s390_linux22)

[Nathan Neulinger]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
> Nathan Neulinger <nneul@umr.edu> writes:
> 
> > How bout a much more capable facility than @sys... Extend that concept
> > into what the old apollo workstations had - dynamic symlinks. Why not
> > make that part of AFS. i.e. support more than just @sys.
> 
> > For example, alot of sites would probably find '@acsys' to be useful to
> > do the autoconf determined sys type.
> 
> Er... for what?
> 
> The output of config.guess is useful for FSF build tools and for doing
> some system-specific checks in configure, and that's pretty much it.

Well, building architecture specific trees of products could be quite
handy, particularly if you start building versions optimized to
particular CPUs, etc. 

Or, mapping product trees according to particular environment variable
choices that would be completely transparent to the calling product.

Or things that are kernel version specific. 

> > I dunno exactly, but it seems like making a more general purpose
> > mechanism would be very useful.
> 
> Hm.  My immediate reaction is that we really don't want to break things
> that aren't broken.  I find @sys quite useful for managing a large shared
> software installation on basically every platform Transarc currently
> supports, and with a few minor tweaks it could be even more useful
> (currently, we're using fs sysname to do that tweak for AIX ourselves).
> I'd really rather not add a bunch of complexity to an idea that's already
> working fine.
> 
> If we start trying to track things like ABI models and whatnot in @sys
> rather than some rough idea of "stuff compiled on a system mapped to this
> @sys value will probably work on other systems also mapped to this @sys
> value in the absence of ABI linking issues and deep kernel magic," I think
> we're going to end up with too fine of granularity.

I would suggest that openafs/afs do anything with it, I'd just suggest
that the functionality be there for anyone who might want to use it.

-- Nathan

------------------------------------------------------------
Nathan Neulinger                       EMail:  nneul@umr.edu
University of Missouri - Rolla         Phone: (573) 341-4841
CIS - Systems Programming                Fax: (573) 341-4216