On 17 Jun 2010, at 21:40, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
> There is that.  I intend to ship with DAFS enabled for Debian, but the
> Debian packages have always taken a fairly aggressive approach to enabling
> features.  (They have had supergroups enabled for quite some time, for
> example, and also enable UNIX domain sockets for fssync, and I intend to
> enable disconnected as well.)

This is one of the many problems with having too many knobs that can be 
twiddled. There is no longer "OpenAFS" - you end up with "Debian's build of 
OpenAFS" which behaves in a completely different way to
"the RPMS on the OpenAFS website", which use completely different paths from 
"the RPMFusion RPMS", which behave differently again to "the Solaris tarball" 
and so on. If you're a new user to OpenAFS, how on earth do you work out which 
set of settings you should be using? Do you know that you're using the Demand 
Attach Fileserver, or whether your package is build with Transarc paths, or 
what the difference between inode and namei is? At some point, you'll just give 
up in disgust.

I'd really like us to standardise on a _small_ (ideally one) set of supported 
configurations which we suggest for each release - and for the binary packages 
that we point users at to use that set of configurations across all platforms. 
It's the only way that we're ever going to manage to produce a coherent 
documentation set, to provide meaningful advice on lists and in chatrooms, and 
in general, retain our sanity.

If we believe the demand attach is ready then, IMO, it shouldn't be hidden 
behind a configuration switch. If it is, I doubt it will see much more use than 
it does at present. My current feeling is that it would be great if we could 
ship both fileservers, side by side, with different executable names - but I 
haven't looked at any of the code to see how complex this would be to achieve.

Cheers,

Simon.

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