On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> What I might try to do, is when parsing auto.master to replace all
> direct mounts with a link into /.a or something, and make /.a an
> indirect mount.
We do something similar here, but we have a network of about 6 machines.
Not that hard to maintain. In a company with say... tens of thousand
machines, this is just unreasonable.
The question is, how commited are you to making Linux easy to use out of
the box? I understand that this isn't easy to impliment, and it's your
baby. Right and wrong are highly subjective terms, but you get to decide
what's right for autofs.
I do, however, ask you to consider the importance of making Linux more
usable out of the box. Sun (I don't mean to keep using Sun as an
example, but I'm most familiar with it... and I work there...) put in the
effort to make these features in autofs available for these reasons, and
it has paid off remarkably well. In a properly configured environment, a
machine can be brought up on the net and have immediata access to all of
the shared NFS resources it needs without intervention by the system
administrator.
If this is to be a Unix platform for corporate end users as well as
geeks and other unix proficient folks, ease of use to needs to be taken
into consideration as well as difficulty of implimentation. Now I'm not
saying drop everything and do it now... but please don't rule this feature
out. It's needed...
Thanks.
-----
Hark ye, Clinker, you are a most notorious offender. You stand convicted of
sickness, hunger, wretchedness, and want.
-- Tobias Smollet
