(was slashes, now NFS devices)

[Kishore Seshadri]

In article <GLX9W24 at xds13.ferranti.com>, peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter
da Silva) writes:
|> In article <FWP1.91Feb23160240 at Jester.CC.MsState.Edu>
fwp1 at CC.MsState.Edu (Frank Peters) writes:
|> > > If you can access remote files, why can't you access remote
devices using
|> > > the same mechanism? Under RFS, special files are interpreted by
the server.
|> > 2. This is probably most important.  NFS is stateless.
|> 
|> This is the killer. I think it would be reasonable to relax statelessness
|> for devices, though.

Isn't this the equivalent of being a 'little' pregnant. To me there seem
to be some very basic inherent differences in the semanntics of files and
devices. Just because Unix has traditionally provided entry points into
devices through the filesystem, this doesn't necessarily rationalize changing
NFS's statelessness to support this feature. I agree it would be nice to have,
but it should probably implemented as a separate state-full protocol(s), and
let people pick the one they like. This is like the locking problem, a wart
on the side of NFS as McVoy put it, but some problems are by nature,
intractable in environments they occur in.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kishore Seshadri,(speaking for myself)       <kseshadr at mipos3.intel.com>
Intel Corporation                            <..!intelca!mipos3!kseshadr>
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.