Re: [9fans] 2 things

[Geoffrey Avila <avlg@sdsc.edu>]

On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, ron minnich wrote:

> On 10/4/07, Geoffrey Avila <avlg@sdsc.edu> wrote:
> >
> > I'll bite. What do 9fans want to know about SRB?
>
> It's an fyi thing. It's another thing plan 9 could do better, that's all.

Hmmm. 'Round about these parts, them's fightin' words....

One of the many things that SRB (and iRODS) address is metadata
management above the layer of the disk filesystem. It's not like we use
it like AFS/NFS, even though that's possible. Lots of people seem to like
getting at their data via an API more rich than what can be reasonably
offered as a seekable bytestream.

Isn't that a very explicitly un-plan9-like thing to want?

I mean, the people who write SRB sorta take it for granted that all of
their users will be running different & incompatible lunix variants and
will want to plug into SRB through their custom HPC app which is probably
written in C++ or Java, if not Python. People are used to a big heavy
library/class thing to call on to do something.

I guess I have a burning desire to know explicitly how & how much better
plan 9 could do this, please don't leave me hanging...

-GBA