On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Ivan Popov wrote:

> For over a year I have run Coda servers and clients not implementing
> Get Root Volume Name RPC at all - and never had any problems because of
> that, all my root volumes, in several cells, are just "/".
> I suggest proclaiming other root volume names deprecated, so that the
> named RPC could be eventually phased out, thus encouraging the
> straightforward naming policy.

A backward-compatible way of migration would be to let clients assume "/"
root volume name all the time, and try to ask for root volume name just in
case the above fails. It would save one RPC (nice, isn't it?) while
talking to servers setup  with a "/" volume, though waste one (?) RPC
otherwise. I am pretty sure no one in the world uses "/" volume name for
anything other than a root volume. Or? :-)

As a (default ;) compilation option one could begin to enforce "/"
configuration by disabling the GetRootVolname operation on the server
side. Then a couple of years later we could get rid of that compatibility
cludge on the client side too.

Note that migration of a setup from another root volume name to "/" is
trivial - create a "/" volume, mount it somewhere (with explicit volume
name, i.e. "old-style"), create the same mountpoints as in the old root
volume, copy other data present there - usually very little, if any, then
remove the temporary mountpoint, change the ROOTVOLUME name (restart
servers?), and you can throw away the old rootvolume.

If there is anybody feeling that an arbitrary (or otherwise not "/") root
volume name is a must - please step forward and argue!

<sigh> of course, we have other more important things to fix with Coda,
but why not this one too?

Yours,
--
Ivan
remembering the long time it took for me to realize:
 - I *can* choose a rootvolume name other than given in the examples
   (some talked about coda:root, some others about coda.root and
    which one suits my setup?...)
 - there is nothing special about this name, any name would do,
   it does not have to contain ether "coda" or ":" or "root"...

much longer time to understand:
 - the choice does not influence *anything*

and then asking myself:
 - why was I forced into making that choice at all???