John Carr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> A nightmare? Surely that's exaggeration. In any case, there is already
> local abbreviation of pathnames. Look in root.afs in the athena.mit.edu cell
> or the cs.cmu cell. If I say "/afs/athena/user" to someone at a remote site,
> chances are that user has to change the name to obey the local conventions
> for root.afs. Users at CMU say "/afs/cs", but we don't have such a directory
> here at MIT. The battle for unique global pathnames is already lost.
But the guarantee exists that /afs/cs.cmu.edu and /afs/athena.mit.edu
are the paths to those cells. Anyone who wants to reference a file
out of a cell knows that the correct explicit pathname. If sites set
up local nicknames, that's their prerogative.
Your argument implies that because a user can "finger @cs" and have
that resolve to cs.cmu.edu in one domain and cs.foo.edu in another
domain, that DNS doesn't guarantee an explicit way of naming
cs.cmu.edu.
What's been proposed is double-tiering the cells in such a way that
there is no guaranteed waying of referencing a specific cell
independent of your location/domain/whatever.
Mind you, I realize that there's no guarantee that a particular cell
is mounted, but, if it is, you know how to reference files from it in
a consistent manner.
-Jay Laefer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
