[OpenAFS-win32-devel] @sys variable name

[Jeffrey Altman]

Tim C. wrote:

>>In Feb 2004, IBM dropped support for Windows NT4 systems.
>>As such they renamed the sysname from "i386_nt40" to "i386_win2k" as
>>documented at:
>>
>>http://www-306.ibm.com/software/stormgmt/afs/manuals/Library/patch.readme.htm#HDRWINDOWS_PRODUCT_NOTES
>>
>>What is the opinion of the community regarding this change?
>>
>>
>  I was actually always suprised at the fact that windows didn't do
>this.  I would be all for this.  People that use this regularly, but
>don't want to distinguish between them, can just place links from
>i386_win2k to i386_nt40.  We've done this for a number of other OSes.
>One question I would through out there is, why not i386_nt50?  I mean
>sun is still sun4x_59(not sure what the sysname for 10 is), in spite of
>the OS being solaris 9.
>
>
The value of sysname is determined at compile time or is loaded
from the Registry at HKLM\SOFTWARE\...\TransarcAFSDaemon\Parameters,
SysName.

I am not a long time user of AFS so I do not really understand if
this value is supposed to represent the version of the AFS Client
Software or the version of the operating system it is running on.
If it is supposed to be the version of the operating system then
I would suggest that we not use a compile time option but instead
provide for a value constructed at runtime based on the OS version.
We would probably want to be able to distinguish:

    * architecture - 32x86, 64x86, itanium, ???
    * operating system - nt40, w2k, xp, w2k3
    * os variation - home, pro, server

Or are these variations really not useful to people?