early-gdm redux ( I am sorry my way is better faster... for a desktop )

[Colin Walters]

On 9/13/07, Jon Nettleton <jon.nettleton at gmail.com> wrote:

> That might work for a single user, but what about a family of users
> that want to share photos?  If anything I would suggest a webdav
> enabled svn repo than rsync+cron.  Drag and drop data, instant
> revision control.  With some ldap and apache magic you can get user
> privileges refined as well.
>

Right - which gets to my point which is that in very few situations do
you actually  want a remote filesystem.  For backing up photos, you
actually don't want to support permanent delete for example, or at
least it should be very hard to do.  Your svn repository would be like
that.

But to go back to why I think autofs/iscsi and other kernel-mounted
filesystems are a bad idea for the desktop is because you need to
design for the laptop case, and my experience with all kernel-mounted
filesystems and laptops has been uninterruptible processes hung on IO
after you disconnect from the network.  By putting things in user
space you avoid this insanity, and it's a heck of a lot simpler.

I'm sure there are situations in which kernel-mounted NFS is
appropriate, but it's one of those technologies I go out of my way to
avoid because there is almost always a better way.