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Re: [itp] Coda filesystem


On Tuesday 04 September 2007 12:54:18 pm Phil Nelson wrote:
> ? ?This is a request for feedback on whether adding the packages that
> make up the Coda filesystem would be something that would be supported.

Yes, that is a long time ago and I didn't at that time get much response.
As a result, I have been running a cygwin mirror with Coda packages added
to that mirror.   This allowed me to make the coda-client a "base"  package on
that mirror (which was unofficial) and then point Coda users to the coda mirror.

Recently, I went to update the Coda mirror and discovered that the most recent
version of setup (2.573.2.3 I believe) requires a setup.ini.sig file to work.   The
2.573.2.2 still loads from the Coda mirror without the .sig files.    I've looked in
the archives to find out about them but haven't seen anything.  I'm assuming
that they are a pgp signature and so it would be impossible for me to sign
my modified setup.ini files.   (If this assumption is false, I'd love to know how
to correctly make the .sig files.)

One other thing, I have recently received a complaint from a Coda user that
the Coda packages are not at all cygwin mirrors.

As a result of the two above issues, I'm back asking if the Coda related packages
should be added to the regular cygwin distribution system.    The Coda mirror
is located at http://coda.cs.cmu.edu/mirrors/cygwin and as I said, 2.573.2.2 will 
correctly load from this mirror.    This mirror is updated now and then (not via cron) 
and was updated yesterday with the most recent version (unannounced as yet)
of the Coda packages.     

The Coda related packages can also be fetched from the Coda ftp server at
ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/other/cygwin.   This contains only the Coda
packages and is not a full mirror.

The biggest problem for adopting Coda at the current time is that the
coda-fsd package does not yet support Vista.  

The Coda packages consist of:

   lwp -- a  Coda specific light weight processes library
   rvm -- a "recoverable virtual memory" library.   Allows memory data
              structures to be mapped to a disk file so memory based
              data structures last longer that one run of a program.  It includes
              transactional operations on the 'rvm'.
   rpc2 -- the remote procedure call package used by Coda.
  coda-client
  coda-server -- both of these are built from the same source tree but are
               broken out to be two packages.    The coda-client has seen most
               of the testing and is the primary package for making a cygwin
               installation a Coda client.   venus, the local cache manager for
               the Coda client runs as a service.    The coda-server should work
               on cygwin but has not had much testing if any.   Most Coda servers
               I know of run on Linux, NetBSD or FreeBSD.

   All of the above packages build with cygwin tools.

  coda-fsd -- this final package is a kernel module that needs to be installed
              for the Coda Client to be able to run.   (The Coda Server does not
              need this run.)    It requires Microsoft tools (Visual Studio in some
              form, the Platform SDK and the DDK.) to be installed along with
              a binary only library from OSR (osr.com) that is a File System 
              Development Kit.  (This version is distributed ONLY for use with
              Coda and can be obtained free of charge from the osr web site.)
             More recent versions of Visual Studio may use newer names for
             the SDK and the DDK and include the SDK as part of Visual Studio.

             Once these tools are installed properly, you can extract the source
             for this package, cd to the source and do:  (In a bash shell of course.)

                     configure ; make ; make install ; make cygwin-pkgs

              and it should do everything properly.    There is a "Building" file
              included with the source.


And one final note, the coda-fsd package does include some code for other
things, most notably a Wise Installer file that allows us to build a .exe  Coda
client installer that includes the cygwin setup.exe and runs it pointing it at
the Coda mirror.   This is the "primary" way most Coda users that are not
familiar with cygwin would install a Coda client.

As a recap, I'm fine running a cygwin mirror for which I add Coda packages
to that mirror, but to run the most recent version of setup I need to be able
to generate the setup.ini.sig file (and there was another .sig file also.)

I am also fine having the above 6 packages being added to the official Cygwin
package system.    Coda-fsd does not yet support Vista, but we hope to get
that done during 2009.    Also, I have not tried running any Coda stuff under
1.7.    That also should happen during 2009.

Thanks for reading such a big e-mail.   I'm ready for all comments.

--Phil

-- 
Phil Nelson (phil at cs.wwu.edu) http://www.cs.wwu.edu/nelson
NetBSD: http://www.NetBSD.org  Coda: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu

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