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

[Russ Allbery]

Adam Megacz <megacz@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:

> 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?

I expect this was a conscious decision at some point that mount points
were special and shouldn't be removable by regular processes that aren't
AFS-aware, but I'm not sure.  They've "always worked that way" at this
point.

>   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.

Mount points *are* symlinks.  So I'm not quite sure what advantage this
would have over the current state.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>