[OpenAFS] inherent reasons why other distributed filesystems don't have unified-mount/dynroot?

[Adam Megacz]

Hey, I'm just curious... afs and coda are the only network filesystems
I've seen with a unified namespace (/afs and /coda) as well as dynamic
mounting ("-dynroot").

Is there some inherent reason why you couldn't add a feature like this
to SMB or NFS?  Obviously AFS has plenty of other advantages over
them, but I'm wondering if there's some crucial design decision in AFS
I'm unaware of that is necessary in order to do this stuff.

I'm toying with the idea of an AFS-to-{SMB,NFS,AppleShare,FTP,SFS}
translator as part of my project to implement an extremely minimal afs
client/fileserver in Java.  The idea is to make it easier to
experiment with AFS hacks by trading off performance.

  - a