On Wed, 18 May 2005, Chris Huebsch wrote:
I think one point being missed is that the current way of doing things is pretty similar for all architectures.
Is it?
I was mostly refering to the afsd-situation where afsd is the way to provide startup parameters, and the argument that you should do away with afsd and let the module handle all parameters. Changing this would add quite a lot to the mess.
<snip>
Regarding location/loading of modules, each architecture has it's way of doing things. IMO, the current framework provides a way of having each platform do its own fiddling to get the module into the kernel, so the openafs can have pretty generic code for parameter handling/passing and whatnot.
The current practice breaks a lot of common Linux administration techniques, building up obstacles installing AFS.
That must be a packaging question, because the Debian packages are easily installed, including the kernel module (install module-source-package, wave your arms appropriately to build the kernel module package for your kernel, install module package, done).
Building openafs by hand and installing on a Linux system might be another matter, but my opinion here is that openafs should provide a reasonably clean framework for building and installing in a --prefix, and full-fleshed-distribution-specific-install with modules in the right place, startups, configs, whatnot should be done by those who package it for your distribution. I would go so far to say that this includes selecting the sysname too, since it makes absolutely no sense for openafs to do this by itself (maintaining an array of all supported architechtures on all different versions of distributions gets just plain silly, and no, "linux on $arch" is not good enough).
Having seen a number of different thingies producing linux kernel modules that needs to be loaded, the ones with the least amount of "clever solutions" have been the ones that are easiest to package and keep up to date. OpenAFS might be full of crud and could do good with a large pickaxe applied to the more annoying historical baggage, but it's a dream linux-kernel-module-wise compared to certain kernel-modules for HPC cluster networks, hardware monitoring (if anyone has a Dell bashing session, I'm on) and so on. They might work good for those having the exact RedHat release the thing was made for, but for the rest of us it's a plain nightmare.
/Nikke - hoping for Ubuntu to achieve world domination so he never has to touch an RPM again ;) -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Niklas Edmundsson, Admin @ {acc,hpc2n}.umu.se | [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- So, you want to pilot a starship? Better eat your Wheaties. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-devel
