NFS future enhancements?

Rick Adams rick at seismo.CSS.GOV
Thu Nov 6 14:25:54 AEST 1986


I think the most wonderful thing Sun could do is enhance NFS to support
UNIX SEMANTICS. (You know, things like forced append, 4.2bsd flock, etc). 

I thought they would take care of my flock complaints with their great new
lock manager. However, apparently they didn't bother. (Hell, nobody uses
flock, right? So much for Sun's OS being 4.2bsd compatible) Having to worry
about the file system being local or remote defeats one of the major purposes
of remote file systems.

It still astonishes me that they continue to ignore the incredible majority
of their customers who just want to connect Unix systems to Unix systems. We 
committed to Unix a long time ago. We have no need for MS-DOS nor
CMS nor GCOS NFS. I suspect the overwhelming majority of their
customers don't either. Of course it doesn't sound quite as nice as
far as marketing bullshit goes, it would just be something that people
could use.

Why is it so difficult to  have a set of OPTIONAL unix extensions that
MS-DOS (or whatever) could return "failed-unimplemented" on? Then,
some of us could get their work done with out "surprises" and
the posturing visionaries could continue their babbling.

---rick



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