[TUHS] Re: NFS 40th anniversary event

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

They both served a purpose.  I'm still a fan of both, C especially,
but I'll admit that C needs careful programmers.  When my older son was
getting into programming, he asked about C (he started with python and
hates it, has moved to Julia for most mathy stuff).  I told him that C is
like a sports car on a narrow, twisty, mountain road with no guard rails.
If you drive a car like that in those conditions, and look at your phone,
you're gonna have a very bad day.  On the other hand, if you are a good
driver and are paying attention, that can be a boat load of fun.

I'm watching your talk and I'm struct by how much of this problem space
we solved in BitKeeper.  Someone had a .signature that said "You're lost
in a tree of repositories, all almost the same".  We certainly solved the
shared mutable data problem.  Our stuff didn't scale to billions of files
though we took a stab at that with nested repositories that worked pretty
well.

I got to the point where you are more or less arguing for the same thing.
I'd be careful about scaling.  If you want consistency, you have to keep
a list of files you are managing.  That list gets big.

As for POSIX, I've very much read the early spec, the whole thing, many
times.  My first job at Sun was implementing POSIX conformance in SunOS.
Maybe I'm naive, but I didn't find it particularly hard, it was a lot of
grunt work, a lot of checking each file system to make them all the same.
I'm sure there is some subtle thing I've missed but Sun was happy with
my work so I don't think I was that far off.

On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 09:43:08AM -0700, Tom Lyon wrote:
> BTW, my own opinions abut NFS can be seen in my "NFS Must Die!" talk here:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc&ab_channel=TomLyon
> 
> Not that NFS *was* bad - but it *is* bad (for non-casual use).
> Like the C language, it was great for its time.  Not so much anymore.
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 9:24???AM Peter Weinberger (?????????) via TUHS <
> tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> > It was a research proof-of-princple. (i.e.. partly principled and
> > partly really hacky. My list of its issues was pretty long.)
> >
> > (If A mounted B's file system somewhere, and B mounted A's, then the
> > directory tree was infinite. That's mathematics, not a bug.)
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 11:56???AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:18:34AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:00???AM Douglas McIlroy
> > > > <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > > > > I was always sorry that Peter Weinberger's RFS never made it outside
> > > > > Bell Labs. It allowed networking between separately administered
> > > > > systems by mapping UIDs.
> > > >
> > > > I believe it did?  If I recall correctly, it was available with System
> > > > V, though perhaps I am misremembering.
> > >
> > > Sunos had it, my office mate ported it.  I was unimpressed, it worked
> > well
> > > between the same archs but was riddled with byte order problems and
> > > ioctl calls that were not portable.
> >

-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat