[OpenAFS-devel] dcerpc.net - freedce

[Marcus Watts]

Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz@cmu.edu> sent:
> 
> 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.

It certainly has changes, but it still has sun copyright notices
sprinkled everywhere and is clearly "rpcgen+changes".  It also
definitely still understands straight sun syntax.  This just worked
for me on a Solaris 2.6 machine:
	% rxgen -l /usr/include/rpcsvc/yp.x
The output looks different from what "rpcgen -l" produces, and it
may well not be "useful", but it sure looks real similar.  The
command-line options that solaris 2.6 rpcgen supports are different,
but I think that is as much due to changes made by sun (to support
different networks?) as those to support RX.

> 
> > 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.

Oh, there are tons of ASN.1 compilers and libraries, with all sorts of
different licenses.  What I was commenting on was the more limited
effect of the code license in openldap and how if sun had released sun
rpc (and rpcgen) with that sort of license, rxgen would have been a lot
more work (at the very least).  Of course, DCE DFS today has an even
more crippling license.

					-Marcus