[OpenAFS] 1.1.0 client on RH 7.1

[Sam Hartman]

>>>>> "Jan" == Jan Hrabe <hrabe@balrog.aecom.yu.edu> writes:

    Jan> I think that it is very important to keep as much
    Jan> compatibility as possible. I would even argue in favour of
    Jan> keeping only the traditional file locations. It seems that
    Jan> quite a few sites will administer mixed installations for
    Jan> some time and it makes live a lot easier if files don't move
    Jan> around. Is there any other reason for the change than
    Jan> adherence to RedHat "standard"?

When you are trying to integrate a product into an operating system it
is very important to follow the standards of that operating system.

You have two conflicting camps.  You have people who encounter AFS
through the operating system and you have people who  encounter the
operating system as a vehicle to deploy AFS or some larger
infrastructure.

The first group is more likely to be encountering AFS for the first
time.  There initial impression is likely to be significantly
influenced  by how well AFS fits their expectations for software in
the operating system environment they are familiar with.  We want to
attract these users to AFS, so we want AFS  to fit their existing
expectations for how software should install, where it should go, and
how it should be configured.

More broadly, we should comply with appropriate standards that have
been established in communities we interact with for how our software
behaves.  For example we're using configure; we should support
--prefix, --exec-prefix and friends.

Yes, at some level, I'm proposing making  things easier for newcomers
to the AFS community  than for existing members.  I believe this is
the correct thing to do for two reasons.  First,  to be successful,
AFS needs to grow.  The rest of the world is finally realizing that
distributed infrastructure is important.  If they look for solutions
and find that AFS requires too much time to learn and understand, they
will discount it, spending their efforts on other technologies.
We cannot afford to be the distributed solution used by a  relatively
small group of large sites.  

However, we cannot ignore the needs of those who want cross-platform
infrastructure and really wish all OSes behaved the same with regard
to AFS.  I think that we do need to provide compatibility behavior for
the filenames at least for a few years.  Upgrading across
non-backwards-compatible changes is very difficult  and we should not
force customers to do that  without a good reason.  

I realize that I'm being somewhat hypocritical here; the Debian
Openafs packages change file locations much more than the Redhat
packages.  There is no /usr/vice or /usr/afs.  I've been meaning to
add a script to create the appropriate symlinks for a while; I have a
prototype in the source package, but haven't added a rule to install
it.