Re: AFS and findutils

[James Youngman]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 04:32:16PM -0500, Steve Simmons wrote:

> There's something in gnu find that appears to be a symptom of
> declining support for AFS rather than a bug.  As such, it seemed
> more useful to write you directly rather than report non-bugs to
> address@hidden  Please accept my apologies if I'm incorrect
> on this.

Not incorrect exactly, but it's useful to include the
address@hidden mailing list on most things of this nature, in
case the maintainer becomes unresponsive or other people have better
ideas about how to solve the problem.  Note that that's a different
email address - bug-findutils is for general discussion of
findutils-related things.  It's not just for reporting bugs.

I have also CC'ed this email to the mailing list, so at least it gets
archived so that we (or Those Who Come After) have the details to hand
if the question comes up again.

> I was examining the find source code for 4.2.15 with an eye towards
> implementing several AFS-related switches.  In particular, I want to
> implement one switch that allows you to specify an AFS volume name
> pattern to be ignored (*.backup would be amazingly useful) and a
> switch that adds AFS volume mount points with '-type afsmount'.  We
> use a lot of AFS here, and there are a number of system maintenance
> tools that would run much faster if find could do these things.  (If
> AFS is greek to you and you'd like more logic on why this stuff is
> good, I'd be happy to burble on.)

I used AFS as an end-user quite abit from about 1990 to about 1994.  I
don't remember the details much.

> In examining the configure settings, it seems that --with-afs is
> now silently ignored.  This could just be a autoconf issue, but since
> it seems to have been unnoticed it makes me wonder if there's been
> a concious deprecation of AFS.

When I took over as maintainer a couple of years ago (almost), the
situation was that there was a lot of "#if AFS" in the code but no way
to "#define AFS" because the AFS support had been removed from the
configure.in file.  AFS had been disabled between release 4.1.6 and
4.1.7, though I don't know why.  The previous maintainer was not
around to clue me in, as he had become unresponsive.

You might find the email at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-findutils/2004-10/msg00026.html
helpful.

I have not re-enabled AFS because I have no way to test the support.
If you are willing to do regular builds from the findutils CVS
repository we can work to include AFS support once more.

See http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=findutils for details of how to
obtain the CVS code, and the file README-CVS in the source repository
for instructions on building from CVS.  Somewhere around there is a
configure.in fragment that we should be able to use to make the
--enable-afs option work.  However, this is all contingent on somebody
being able to test findutils on AFS systems prior to release.  Well,
not every release, but frequently enough so that AFS support isn't
continually broken.

Please let me know if you are willing to collaborate on this.

Regards,
James.