[OpenAFS-devel] dcerpc.net - freedce

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Marcus Watts wrote:

> Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz@cmu.edu> writes:
> > 
> > About the only thing Rx has in common with sunrpc is XDR, which is pretty
> > much identical in both protocols (enough so that kernel-rx does not
> > include its own XDR, but instead depends on the one already present in the
> > kernel for supporting NFS).
> 
> rx also shares rpcgen -- rxgen *is* rpcgen with "extra" stuff.
> I think it's still possible to use rpcgen to produce straight sun
> stuff, although the documentation on all that is pretty skimpy.

I'm not positive, but I don't think that's true any more -- rxgen has
changes that make it unsuitable for generating sunrpc stubs; if nothing
else, it only contains one parser, which understand the .xg format.

> Code re-use is a cool thing, and it's a really cool thing the
> developers of rxgen were able to do so.  Even today, many opensource
> projects don't "get" the notion of code re-use.  It would, for
> instance, be difficult to pull the ASN.1 parsing code out of openldap,
> use it to parse, say, K5 tickets, and distribute the result as
> part of some other package.  (This is why "Artistic" licenses
> suck, but that's a whole 'nuther rant.)

Perhaps; however...  The people at KTH have written a limited ASN.1
compiler which they use for parsing and generating the Kerberos V5
protocol.  It's not a full implementation, but it is general-purpose and
could be easily used for things other than krb5.

-- Jeff