AFS in Extras

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 11:20:43PM -0600, Josh Boyer wrote:
> IIRC, someone out there had some RPMs that allowed AFS to be used with
> the 2.6 kernel.  I don't remember who, but I do know a couple people
> using said RPMs.

Me, maybe? <http://www.mattdm.org/misc/openafs/>

> Any chance that person could come forward and maintain them for Fedora
> Extras?

Possibly. There's quite a few things I'm not really happy with yet -- in
particular, the way the kernel modules get made ends up pretty much
completely ignoring any RPM dependency information, which is unfortunate.

And, there's a lot of crazy unstability right now, with surprises with every
new kernel release. At the very least, I think this should wait for the 1.4
OpenAFS release. 

Part of the problem is a collision between Fedora's new plan -- "track
upstream as closely as possible" -- and the new 2.6 kernel world order --
"2.6 isn't really stable; vendors make forked branches which are stable".
Both fine ideas on their own, but a bad mix.

This particularly shows up with external modules like OpenAFS, but, on a
tangental note, probably also explains why my updated system at work kernel
panics with the new FC2 errata kernel on boot with something with the
adaptec SCSI driver. (I'm at home with the new baby, so this is just a
report from someone else of what's on the screen when the machine failed to
come back up.)

Anyway, I'm not really sure what to do about it, other than:

  1) Hope that major donations to openafs development catch on:
  <http://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-info/2005-January/016335.html>
  and major and ongoing Linux development takes place

or

  2) hope that NFS4 ends up being amazing and perfect, and start migrating
  everything

or 

  3) hope that the in-kernel AFS client gets some lovin'. (Unlikely, from
  what I've heard, unless, again, some major money shows up.)


-- 
Matthew Miller            mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
-->  Fedora Users & Developers Conference, hosted by Boston University  <--
February 18th, 2005                 <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon1>