[OpenAFS-devel] DRAFT: New sysname standard

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 1:01 PM -0500 5/7/01, Neulinger, Nathan wrote:
>  Garance wrote:
>  > 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.

I am not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here...
A few more sys-admin settable @-variables would be fine by me.

>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 @.

That is my thinking, yes.

>  > 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.

There is some advantage in knowing what variables are common
across sites.  If you make a program available in openafs,
and you reference a pathname of /blah/@something/file, then
people at other sites may not have that @something.

Though I am just saying that there is some advantage in having
a short list of such variables.  To me this is more of an
implementation detail, and I don't feel too strongly about it.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu