[OpenAFS-devel] DRAFT: New sysname standard

[Neulinger, Nathan]

> At 11:09 AM -0400 5/7/01, eichin-oa@boxedpenguin.com wrote:
> >recall that Domain/OS (the last system that had interpolation of
> >variables in pathnames) had several system-specified ones... but
> >would also allow interpolation of arbitrary environment variables.
> >(I shudder now to think about the security implications, but
> >there were some cool uses.)
> 
> While it's easy to think of cool uses, I *really* do not want
> to discuss support for arbitrary environment variables.  To my
> mind, it brings up too many issues wrt security and performance,
> and thus it scares me off.

Right - so individual sites aren't forced to use them... It should be up to
the administrator on the given machines whether to make use of them or not.
Doing it in AFS provides a nice cross-platform way of doing it... I
personally would love to have a @ variable that mapped to our _local_
architecture strings that have nothing to do with afs sysnames. 

As for the performance, it really shouldn't be any more of a performance hit
than the current @sys stuff is, and even then should just be linear, and
only if link starts with @. 

> I think we could do a few system-specified variables though.
> My guess is that it would probably be best to try for as few
> as possible, just enough so we aren't trying to have @sys
> serve for incompatible uses.

Adding support for a list of variables shouldn't be any harder than wiring
in particular variables, and anything that avoids hardwiring strings is a
good thing in my book.

-- Nathan