[OpenAFS] Re: Thinking about a different way to distribute configuration.

[Russ Allbery]

"Christopher D. Clausen" <cclausen@acm.org> writes:

> *YOUR* configuration management system is Puppet.  Great!  Some of us
> use other products, like say Windows Group Policy.
>
> The OpenAFS for Windows client already does support registry settings
> for nearly everything and I would like to eventually use OpenAFS
> servers on Windows and as such I think that somehow supporting the
> Windows registry should be a key feature of OpenAFS servers on
> Windows.

I know very little about what's native on Windows, so I wouldn't hazard
to set policy there, but I'm happy to defer to the people who know
Windows on whether AFS should use INI files, Registry entries, or
something else so that AFS follows the principle of least surprise.
(The last time I used Windows seriously, everything used INI files and
the Registry didn't exist, so you can tell from that how out of date I
am on what's being done today.)

On UNIX, the principle of least surprise indicates we should use
configuration files.  On Windows it may be something different, which is
one of the challenges of being cross-platform.  But as a general
principle, I think AFS should integrate with existing management
frameworks on the platforms it natively supports, not invent a separate
configuration management system that's compatible across AFS but
incompatible with anything else done on the local platforms.

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