While at Transarc many years ago, I proposed an extension to path lookups to address deficiencies in @sysname similar to what is being discussed here. The proposal was to perform expansion on any path entry that began with '@' and resolve according to a cell-wide table and an optional override at the AFS client. The cell-wide table would define the list of variables that would be allowed to be set within the cell. The cell-wide table could specify entries that could not be overridden and also entries required to be defined at the client. If a variable could not be expanded, an ENOENT would be returned on open(2), creat(2), or rename(2). The initial variable list was to include all entries in the utsname structure (defined in <sys/utsname.h <http://linux.die.net/include/sys/utsname.h> >) as returned by uname(2) <http://linux.die.net/man/2/uname> . Extended uses could include things beyond architecture such as department, location, etc. as determined by the administrators of the cell as requirements dictated. Over time, a subset of possible variables (e.g., sysname, the utsname entries) would be provided by the AFS codebase (the minimal set) . As long as this minimal set could not be overridden (i.e., the behavior is predictable), it would be applicable across all cells. - jss Ref: http://linux.die.net/include/sys/utsname.h http://linux.die.net/man/2/uname
________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Avinesh Kumar Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2008 6:41 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [OpenAFS] why linux sysnames are different We can keep the old sysnames as is, and invent a new convention based on kernel version or glibc version for newer systems. This way we would be backward compatible and probably solve the problem for newer systems as well. On Jan 2, 2008 5:43 PM, Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "Avinesh Kumar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Seem the right reason to do this in past ! > But the problem is still there. And probably always will be, since changing sysnames is a nasty backward-incompatible change and people have already build infrastructure on local interpretations or workarounds for the existing sysnames. I suppose we could start setting a sysname list based on both the kernel version and the glibc version by default, but I shudder to think of the Autoconf glue. -- Russ Allbery ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ <http://www.eyrie.org/%7Eeagle/> > _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
