but if you go down this path long enough to its logical end you wind up not liking the /afs/<cell> convention very much...
What are the alternatives? Who gets to decide what content gets what globally unique path?
You can have location independence inside a cell because all the admins communicate and (hopefully) coordinate their activities. You can do this to a limited extent among a number of cooperating cells by defining a "virtual cell" in root.afs that symlinks to appropriate places depending on the client's home cell. (example: carnegie mellon operates a branch campus in Qatar's Education City. In both the main campus cell and the sattelite cell, /afs/ThisCell/data-campus points at an appropriate set of volumes containing configuration data for clients at that location. /afs/ThisCell/@sys contains the workstation/server environment. This doesn't work so well for home directories though, since they can't usefully be in more than one location at a a time. )
You can't do it between non-cooperating cells because the resulting namespace would end up not being consistent from client to client. So much for a global filesystem. (properly, the cmu virtual cell should be named common-namespace.cmu.edu or some such and not ThisCell, but I wasn't thinking about that aspect of the situation when I came up with the name.)
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