NFS vs. RFS

[Charles Hedrick]

YP is conceptually separate from NFS.  Pyramid supports NFS but not
YP, because they aren't very happy with YP in its current form.
However Gould is not alone in bundling the two together.  Celerity
seems to do so as well.  In my view NFS is more general in its
usefulness than YP.  For a large set of diskless machines, it's very
useful to have both.  But NFS is also useful with larger timesharing
system, an environment in which YP may not be necessary.  There is
nothing in NFS that makes it depend upon YP.  They are both
implemented on top of RPC, but they are separate services.  When YP is
present, programs are larger if they use any routine that reads from a
YP database.  Examples are the YP versions of standard C library
routines for reading password entries, host table entries, etc.