[OpenAFS] curious about why mountpoints work the way they do

[Adam Megacz]

Hi there.  I have a few questions about why openafs mountpoints work
the way they do.  Please don't interpret this as criticism -- I'm
mainly trying to understand why things work the way they do.

  1. Why does remove(char*) not work on mountpoints?

  2. In some alternate universe, would it have been possible to
     implement mountpoints as symlinks to some volume-name space?  For
     example, if the cache manager automatically mapped
     /afs/cell/@vol/volname to the root directory of volume "volname"
     in cell "cell", mountpoints could be implemented as symlinks.

The main problems with #2 as far as I can tell are that it would only
work with dynroot (and some sites don't like that), and that ".."
works differently for mountpoints than for symlinks; for example:

     /afs/foo/bar/mountpoint/../ is always /afs/foo/bar/

... whereas that isn't the case for symlinks.  This is, as far as I
can tell, the most interesting aspect of AFS' mountpoints.

Thanks!

  - a

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