"A month of sundays ago Brian Bartholomew wrote:"
> 
> I have the perception that coda is hard to build and install.
> Actually, I have the perception that it's a complete and total
> gelatinous mess, which every so often gets scraped up out of students'

I agree, but don't want to be hit by the gelatin from the makers! Last
time I said this was 6 months ago, when it took me a lot of effort to fix
enough to compile, and then I never really got it working anyway. It
took 100MB of disk space compiled then. A month or so ago when I tried
again I was able to compile it with minimal intervention, and get it
going exactly as per instructions - a big improvement. In fact, that there
were instructions was a big improvement.

> If you improve the release engineering so that I can get coda running
> with one ftp, one tar, one configure, one make, and one shell script
> to start the daemons -- I will do so!  Simple as that.  And so will a
> lot of other people, I think.

Yep - and in particular I would like people like me (well, I like me,
anyway :-) who mail in a set of patches that they had to use to at least
get an acknowledge back.  I never heard anything.  I could probably
remake the patches.  The problem probably is that the developers are
working on 5.0 and releasing 4.6, and sorry, I'm hardly likely to be
interested in 5.0 while you're developing it and you're hardly likely to
be interested in 4.6 while you're not!

> > Hopefully you can write some testing software for us
> 
> If you can deliver the filesystem in a nice package, I'll be happy to
> break it for you.  Please supply two scripts: One script that resets

Agreed.

> >From what little I see on the announcement list, you're quite firmly a
> Cathedral.  This is not from an autocratic style, but simply because
> you're the only people that understand the design and the internals

Yep - I can't make head or tail of it. It being so monolithic drove me to
backport the nbd driver and now I have raid5 working nicely over the net.
I don't want the disconnected facilities of coda. I just want redundancy.
If that comes via failover, well and good, but I only needed 1000 lines
of code to do it via redundancy.

> well enough to do anything.  First attract a bunch of bug reporters
> with an easy-to-install product.  Then some of them will slowly wade
> into the code, after they've absorbed its behavior from their bug
> reporting.

Yep.  It's quite impervious to examination at the mo.  When I looked at
it first the names of the demons weren't the same as those used in the
docs - I understand why, and that's just a forinstance for why it is/was
impossible to get up and running then.  I see claims that people have
installed it, and I maybe believe that the rpms's helped (hint: take the
rpms, examine their spec, then undo the redhat-isms, and compile to
taste: gives you a workable product) for people running exactly the
same system as the rpms were written on. But that's not interesting
to the rest of us. 

Peter ptb2it.uc3m.es