On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 09:20:17AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> > My opinion is that it is a strenuous task to package according
> > to different ditro's preferences (many moving targets at once).
> 
> I have not found coda to be that hard to package.  In pkgsrc, there are
> separate packages for lwp, rpc2, rvm and coda.  Each builds
> straightforwardly.  The kernel support is in the NetBSD base system.

Sure. But it is still just one packaging system of many to be
maintained, if we want to comply to the expectations of different
versions of Debian, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, ...
A single point of maintenance scales much better.

I hope to eventually be able to split the actual Coda mount() operation
in Venus into a separate binary to be exec()-ed, then I could even
on NetBSD reuse the same installer and binaries as on Linux, except of
this tiny "mounter" one (then Venus could run under Linux-ABI, while
mount() must be native).

It is actually one of the issues holding back my usage of NetBSD.

The same limitation forces me currently to compile the client separately
for 32- and 64-bit kernels.

Of course the unification change will become feasible only when the pioctls
are "shortcut" past the kernel module, as in Ulocoda.

> you have an
> alternative packaging/distribution scheme that uses coda.  But someone
> that is using a conventional system and wants to use coda needs coda
> packages.

> So while I think what you are doing with software distribution is cool,
> I think we still need packages.

Installing Coda is actually easier/faster with the universal installer than
with the Debian-specific package. Try and compare yourself.

for a 32-bit Intel Linux 2.6+ (assuming that you trust CA Cert or
that I went to the trouble of arranging a trust chain adequate for Debian)

  wget https://www.aetey.se/dl/cocli-2.1-6.9.5-linux-ia32-3.bin
  chmod +x cocli-2.1-6.9.5-linux-ia32-3.bin
  ./cocli-2.1-6.9.5-linux-ia32-3.bin <enter>...
  ln -s /bin/codaclient /etc/init.d; update-rc.d codaclient defaults

A single "apt-get update" takes about as long or longer for me than the
whole sequence above.

I think Debian practically and design-wise is the best distribution
in existence and appreciate the benefits of having a "platform-native"
installer - but not enough to spend time on it.

> Has anyone gotten coda to run on android?

At the time CMU ported Coda to android the OS lacked some prerequisits
like daemon-friendliness. Now it looks quite doable but to the best
of my knowledge nobody did.

Regards,
Rune