[26766] in Athena Bugs
athdir doesn't fall back to /mit/locker/bin
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Tue Mar 7 17:18:13 2006
Message-Id: <200603072217.k27MHaEn003950@byte-me.mit.edu>
To: bugs@mit.edu
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 17:17:36 -0500
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@mit.edu>
X-Spam-Score: 1.217
X-Spam-Level: * (1.217)
X-Spam-Flag: NO
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
If a local pseudouser (which doesn't run the Athena startup scripts, and
thus doesn't have $ATHENA_SYS and $ATHENA_SYS_COMPAT set) tries to athrun
something from a locker, and the locker doesn't have an arch/sun4x_510 (or
arch/i386_rhel4) directory or symlink, they'll fail and get an error message
from attachandrun saying that it couldn't find a binary directory. This
happens regardless of whether there's a bin -> arch/@sys/bin symlink in the
top level of the locker.
The cause of this is a special treatment of the 'bin' directory type in
the athdir library, which avoids falling back to bin in the top level of
the locker. This might have made more sense long ago, but I think it's
outdated now that AFS's @sys expansion uses a list of probably-compatible
sysnames. I think it would be preferable for athdir to fall back to a top
level bin (or lib) directory failing all else, and see if AFS can resolve
the problem.
Would there be negative repercussions to changing this behavior? If not,
I'd be happy to submit a patch to do so.
Mitch
