Re: News 2009-08-31

[Sergiu Ivanov]

Hello,

On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 12:20:11PM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 6. September 2009 10:45:34 schrieb Sergiu Ivanov:
>
> > antrik gave me a passing final evaluation, so (at least formally) the
> > GSoC was a success.  In my local repositories I have a working
> > implementation of what I understood was expected of me.  However, I'm
> > not sure as to whether these changes should all go in the public
> > unionfs git repository or not :-(
> 
> In my opinion it should go public at once.  People should have the
> option of testing your work, especially since it was done as part of
> the GSoC.

I'm inclined to occupy a similar position.  However, I'd say that we
somehow failed to discuss how exactly to make the code public :-( Of
course, I can just create a master-unionmount branch in the unionfs
repository, but I'm not sure antrik will approve of that.  OTOH, I
could push my repository to something like github.

antrik, what do you say?
 
> For the news it would be great to have a short text snippet which
> explains how to get and use the unionfs translator.

The usage of unionmount is simple:

 $ settrans -a <node> unionfs -ut <translator>

This will union-mount <translator> on <node>.

Of course, there are several other options; they are briefly described
in the output of unionfs --help and I also hope to have some time to
write a more extensive documentation sometime in the future (most
probably, this sometime is in winter :-( ).

Also (if required) I can provide a short explanation on some Hurd wiki
page.  This will take less time than writing full-fledge documentation
(which means that I'll be able to do it much sooner) and should be
enough for the majority of use-cases.
 
> > Also, we (antrik and me) are back to thinking about namespace-based
> > translator selection, so the nsmux project is getting alive again and
> > should be so until we decide to choose a better implementation idea
> > :-) (which shouldn't happen, though, until a working filter/nsmux has
> > been implemented).
> 
> So we'll have the option of showing an XML file as filesystem hierarchy at 
> some time via a simple ls blah.xml,,xml2dir? 
> 
> (or at least the option to do so, once we have the corresponding xml2dir 
> translator)

One can actually do that now already.  Just give me the xml2dir
translator :-) As I said, the problem is that the implementation of
the filter proved to me more tricky that expected and that's what we
are working at now.  Also, nsmux completely lacks the possibility to
recursively propagate dynamic translator down directories, but we will
definitely address this issue once.
 
> Will unionfs and nsmux be shipped with the Hurd LiveCDs/Qemu images,
> so people can easily test them?

I'm rather inclined to consider that shipping unionfs and nsmux with
LiveCDs and QEMU images is not an imperative to encourage their
testing.  Potential users could just as well download the code or
clone the repositories locally.  Note that as opposed to some other
translators (like Zheng's eth-multiplexer), both unionfs and nsmux
were designed to be stand-alone, i.e. building unionfs and nsmux
basically resumes to getting the code and running make.

Regards,
scolobb