From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2007 22:07:43 -0700 From: Geoffrey Avila To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] 2 things In-Reply-To: <13426df10710041800o1918158h5aa2bfbd06b166b3@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Topicbox-Message-UUID: caf8c078-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, ron minnich wrote: > On 10/4/07, Geoffrey Avila 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