[6097] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Reworking liblocker
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Dec 3 15:10:07 2008
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Greg Price <price@mit.edu>
Cc: Evan Broder <broder@mit.edu>, release-team@mit.edu, athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20081203191522.GZ10836@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:09:39 -0500
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Insasmuch as the Athena 10 as we've been distributing it contains the
Athena 9 detach man page, the functions of detach are documented, and
missing.
Additionally, the detach script that we distribute for the non-athena,
stand-alone OpenAFS removes the /mit symbolic link created by the attach
script we provide.
Other things that the Athena 10 detach man page says that it does:
* unsubscribe you from the zephyr filsys notification that attach
subscribed you to.
* offers you the option to detach all filesystems.
* offers you the option to clean up the attachtab.
I think going forward, that debathena is the outlier here and needs to
offer some of the functionality of detach as deployed everywhere else.
At the very least it is a bug that there is a man page that says detach
does all these things, when in fact, it does not.
Speaking as the guy who was Dan Winship's manager when he initially
wrote detach (and the man page), I would say: The semantics you like
are really closer in spirit to how the Sun automounter approached remote
filesystems, not the way Athena did. I'd advocate for a way to offer
the semantics of detach that give you the ability to disable access to
the filesystem. That is what detach is for. If you don't like those
semantics, you don't have to use the detach command, but I think its
incorrect to argue that the detach concept should change simply because
debathena broke with the Athena canon.
At minimum we should:
* Fix add -r to remove the path element even if the locker is not
attached.
* Prepare a new man page for detach that describes what it actually
does.
To go beyond the minimum, in my opinion, we should proceed with
semantics that broder has outlined.
-Bill
On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 14:15 -0500, Greg Price wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 02:09:54PM -0500, Bill Cattey wrote:
> > You want to maintain the debathena semantic compatibility that the
> > detach command does nothing?
>
> Yes, that's exactly the point. It's a consequence of the
> always-working /mit namespace, which is an explicit, constantly
> helpful design feature of Debathena.
>
> Use add -r to remove things from your PATH, because it actually alters
> your PATH. I guess I'm not aware of much else detach is useful for.
>
> Greg
