Re: AFS and findutils

[Steve Simmons]

Thanks for the kind response, James.

> > 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.

I've managed to lay my hands on copies of the 4.1.6 and 4.1.7
tarballs, will do a comparison of them and see if any features have
been 'lost'.  Thus far my experience with 4.2.15 says things are
find once ./configure is correctly modified.

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

Yes, it sounds like Greg Earle encountered the same issues I did with
4.1.7 and fixed them in a similar manner.

> 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.

Yes, I'm willing to do find testing and some code development in
AFSland and am familiar with using remote CVS archives.  Here are
the environments I can take care of:

   Solaris 7 with Transarc (legacy) AFS
   Solaris 8 with Transarc (legacy) AFS
   Solaris 9 with Transarc (legacy) AFS
   RedHat Advanced Workstation 3.X with OpenAFS 1.3.X, 2.4 kernel
      (OpenAFS does not yet work with 2.6 kernel, Transarc does
       not and will not support 2.6)

Our Solaris 7 support here is being phased out; Solaris 9 will being
using OpenAFS in the near future.  Solaris 8 will be probably be around
for a year or two.  If it stays past one year, we'll probably look at
rolling it from Transarc AFS to OpenAFS.

> > 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.

I'll send a separate note about the utility (and some unique issues)
with the AFS switches I propose so that the individual issues will be
easier to follow.

Steve