[OpenAFS] Re: sysname for 3.x linux kernel

[Andrew Deason]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2012 14:42:48 -0700
Ken Dreyer <ktdreyer@ktdreyer.com> wrote:

> Would it be feasible to make this change effective in a major version
> release, say, OpenAFS 2.0? Speaking as a user of OpenAFS, the list of
> things that must be manually configured has such a high learning curve
> to newbies that choosing a useful, modern default would be great.

Well, two things:

You as an end user don't need to tweak this; $arch_linux26 works. I'm
not sure at this point what problem you're trying to solve...?
"$arch_linux26 looks funny" doesn't seem very convincing to me... This
kind of misnomer happens all the time; arguably even with the first half
of your current sysname, called amd64 :)

I would imagine this particular case is especially common, since many
software projects I expect made a change where they added "Linux 3.*
support" by treating 3.* versions the same as 2.6.*. And even if you
added an amd64_linux sysname... you'd still need to keep directories
called amd64_linux26 etc around, in order for the older clients to make
use of them.

Secondly, this is easily modifiable by distributions. I think the
closest thing Linux has to a "platform" like those of commercial unices
(and maybe the BSDs) is a distribution-specific moniker. Just because
the OpenAFS project doesn't include anything more specific than
"$arch_linux26" by default doesn't mean we can't have a distro-specific
tag by default in front of that (and the RPMs related to this thread are
already doing that). That seems like a pretty easy way to get more
granularity and be more 'modern'.

-- 
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net