[fedfs-utils] Proposal for end-of-life for fedfs-utils development

[Chuck Lever]

> On Aug 1, 2017, at 8:40 PM, Ian Kent <raven at themaw.net> wrote:
> 
> On 07/06/17 23:55, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
>> So if it's not too depressing I'd be curious what went wrong--did this
>> turn out to be harder than we thought to get stable, or are people happy
>> enough with automounting, or did we just not do a good job of explaining
>> it to people that might use it, or some combination of all those?
> 
> Having had to setup a test environment to check how things work a couple of
> times I must admit I found it a bit difficult to use. But perhaps that's
> because a test setup needs an LDAP server and a DNS forwarding server for
> the SRV records.
> 
> Now I'm wondering if it would be worth adding some (quite a bit actually) of
> this to autofs.
> 
> The problem that comes to mind is that to eliminate the need for the FedFS
> management utilities would mean a fair amount of work in autofs. Then there's
> the need for an nfsref(8) that supports FedFS referrals which probably doesn't
> quite fit in autofs and without it the rest doesn't seem worth doing.
> 
> My thoughts about what I can do are still forming and now I'm wondering what
> others that care about this functionality think about it.

We wouldn't carry all of the FedFS functionality forward. Basically
everything that is related to LDAP would be deprecated.

There are two main pieces left.

-> The DNS SRV piece needs either mount.fedfs or equivalent autofs
functionality. The tool for managing domain roots is nothing more
than syntactic sugar. No need to carry it forward.

-> nfsref can manage basic referrals, which don't require any LDAP
support. nfsref and the junction library could be moved into nfs-utils
to support basic referrals.

In other words the only piece autofs needs is support for /nfs4.
The NFS-server piece would reside in nfs-utils.

Walking away from all of it is an option too.


> Thoughts?
> 
>> 
>> --b.
>> 
>> On Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 11:01:05AM -0400, Chuck Lever wrote:
>>> Upstream fedfs-utils has not been under active development for
>>> two years or more, and there is a scant user base. I'd like to
>>> propose making 0.10 the final major release of fedfs-utils.
>>> 
>>> The plan:
>>> 
>>> - Since 0.10 is in at least one major enterprise distribution,
>>> I will remain available to integrate security fixes and make
>>> new minor releases in the 0.10 line, as needed, for one to
>>> two more years.
>>> 
>>> - Retire and remove fedfs-utils from upstream mirror distros
>>> such as Fedora rawhide.
>>> 
>>> - Transfer utilities such as nfsref into nfs-utils, with
>>> support for FedFS junctions removed.
>>> 
>>> - Announcements of the change in status will be made on
>>> fedfs-utils-announce and on the wiki.linux-nfs.org site.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Comments welcome!
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Chuck Lever
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
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>> 
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--
Chuck Lever