[OpenAFS-devel] Initial concern about Linux 2.4 patch

[Sam Hartman]

I have not fully looked at the patch and certainly have not imported
into my tree yet.  I am concerned about two potential problems:

* it appears to add a sys_name of i386_linux24.  I'm not sure that is
  a good idea; I believe that the ABI for Linux has been fairly stable
  between 2.2 and 2.4 and binaries are likely to work on both systems.
  I'm not sure that a new @sys value provides any utility and
  certainly makes like more complex for software maintainers if there
  aren't real differences that people care about.  I think perhaps
  focusing on glibc2.2 vs 2.1 might be a better distinction if we want
  to add a new Linux sys_name.

Also, it seems that there are a lot of references to the sysname
scattered throughout the patch for example both in src/config and
src/libafs/MakefileProto.LINUX.  If it was just kernel versions, I'm
not sure I would mind much, but we seem to be multiplying Linux
architectures (currently ppc and i386) by Linux versions (22 and 24).  

If we are going to have this type of crossproduct, it should be in one
place.  Otherwise, I believe the code may become unmaintainable.

I am not sure that there is any easy way of addressing these concerns.