NFS future enhancements?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <41986 at beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> rick at seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) writes:
>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). 

It gets even worse on System V NFS implementations, since one loses
record locking and has an implementation conflict with RFS.  Needing
a global user ID space ("yellow pages") is also unacceptable in many
applications.

It's sad that NFS seems to be spreading as the "de facto" standard
remote file approach when its original design deliberately avoided
solving the really hard problems.  Either LOCUS or RFS (the AT&T
trademarked one, not the U.Wisc. research thing) has much better
technical properties.  If LOCUS, Inc. or AT&T want to do something
about this, they better hurry.  One thing Sun does seem to have done
right with NFS is to help make it widely available, and that may be
what settles the matter.

Sun, DEC, and AT&T have all taken quite similar approaches to the
"generalized file system"; this would be a good time to produce a
merged version that could be used for all of these various net file
system implementations.  Perhaps then NFS-2 could support full UNIX
semantics on UNIX systems and emulate whatever it can on MS/DOS
(which I personally don't care about), with support for the
"advertise remote mountable file system" and user ID mapping
features of RFS.  Do these guys talk with each other?  Why do we
keep slugging it out in the marketplace when cooperation would
benefit all involved (including the customers)?