[OpenAFS-devel] Some low-hanging RPC fruit vs long-term needs

[chas williams - CONTRACTOR]

On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:58:50 -0500
Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@secure-endpoints.com> wrote:

> Even in less extreme cases, if you have 1.4.12 servers deployed today
> and you discover a bug and patch it, how are you going to locally
> modify the version number to reflect that?  If you do modify it, then
> the bug work arounds for 1.4.12 will stop being triggered and if you
> don't modify then 1.4.13 clients that have a work around for 1.4.12
> will begin to avoid a bug that you have already patched.  Since you
> do not control the deployment of clients you can't ensure that there
> will be synchronization between when you deploy 1.4.13 and the new
> clients show up at your server's door step.

you cant control all the clients in the world so the only sane thing
might be to only use certain features in the clients iff you are certain
the server supports the feature.  if someone makes a patch in the server
and changes the version number, the client needs to default to a safe
mode.  we have this right now, clients can operate safely against any
server as long as they dont use certain features.

dont put a fix in the 1.4.13 clients to use a workaround if the server
1.4.12.  put a fix in the 1.4.13 clients to not perform the operation
in question unless they know the server is 1.4.13 or better.

if you find and fix a bug in a 1.4.12 server, you dont need to do
anything to the clients.  they are already triggering the bug
regardless of the version test apparently.