> Fair enough. But what's the adoption overall? Among organizations who want 10,000+ users sharing a single (apparent) file system? I know there are organizations which would dramatically benefit from that kind of infrastructure, who don't have it, because they are using NFS (e.g., a university CS department where the grad students use one NFS infrastructure and the undergrads use another, and there is no way to set up a group for all members of a class!). I think each of those organizations is an argument for AFS, not for NFS.
More globally, if the high adoption rate of NFS is an argument in favor of its architecture, and the low adoption rate of AFS is an argument against its architecture, why are you reading a Plan 9 mailing list...? > To some extent, the popularity of NFS (is there any NAS box that > talks AFS?) and Linux is one big testament to the power of "good > enough" or "worse is better". > > Designing "enterprise grade" things is very hard work. > Implementing them is even harder. The good news is that it > pays well. The bad news is that you have to be really brave to > withstand the fear of being obsolete by changing requirements. I don't get this. I don't follow the NFS protocol development carefully, but honestly it seems to me that (a) it's getting a lot bigger over time, and (b) this is substantially by adding features (leases, non-silly authentication, user-defined groups) which were in AFS in the 80's. That is, I think the requirements are *not* changing, but rather that NFS is slowly realizing that those things *are* requirements. Now there is a fine economic/practical argument for gradually evolving a system toward a desired set of goals, so that you spread upgrade, training, and incompatibility costs out over time, so that evolving NFS into AFS over 35 years makes more sense than forcing AFS painfully on people all at once. Personally I think it's been worthwhile to a lot of people at a lot of organizations to get 25 years of early access to certain features. None of this is to say that AFS doesn't have unnecessary cruft, or, again, that it isn't possible to meet the same goals with less complexity now that we know more. Dave Eckhardt
