Re: [9fans] How to implement a moral equivalent of automounter in Plan9?

["Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>]

> Russ, could, you please be a tad more specific as to what ill
> exactly are you referring to?

I was referring to needing special privilege to mount something.

> While I agree that Plan9 completely removes the need for
> automounter to be a privileged application, I still don't
> see an easy way (expect may be bns and adsrv) to have that
> other property of automounter being easily implemented
> within Plan9 framework.

I described a simple shim program (as did Dan Cross)
that would work just fine, for one user.

> That's very similar to what I referred to as a "synthetic filesystem
> doing the right stuff". But as I pointed out in my original email
> this approach has a downside of never exporting these mounts
> into the namespace of the process that caused them.

You'd have the program export its own name space,
a delicate but not impossible dance.  Then its mounts
would be exported too.

> I guess I'm not quite following you here. What I'm talking about is
> a per-process modifications of namespace by some external agent
> (be it kernel driver or userspace application). As such it is not
> at all different from a user issuing something like "9fs name"
> directly.

That's fine.

> Could you, please, elaborate what exact multi-user scenario do you
> have in mind?

I was talking about multiple users sharing a single automounter,
like in modern Unixes.

Russ