Re: time for a flamewar, or ... what about grdb

[Karl Nelson <kenelson ece ucdavis edu>]

> Dear Karl, you are reading but you are not understanding.

I think I am understanding your statements, but perhaps you had
better explain why you feel X resources and transparent network
model is so unnecessary.  

 
> I would rather not waste time going through each one of your points,
> but tell me, does every machine share /?  If not, then they do have
> different views of the file system. 

I don't see why they must share / to be sharing filesystems.
This is a very limited view all things considered.  
Oddly enough we do have machines which share /, but this is
certainly not ordinary.  All HP-UX machines are clones using
dhcp so quite literally the only thing different is the logs, however,
given modern diskspace and the cost of the ATM network, we general clone.
In fact, HP-UX ships a product to share / for diskless clients.
But sharing / is not a requirement for sharing the "file system"
in that beyond / every directory but /etc, /tmp, and /var is linked
to a common file structure.  Computing is highly distributed in
that many applications don't even run on all the machines because
of licensing.  Thus calling up an application often will give you
a screen from another machine without the user ever knowing about it.
Yes, that means if you start an application under /tmp on one machine
you will find the files of the machine where you tried to start the
application.    

And yes, we have users here who are very concerned with being able
to get the preferences (color, fonts, style, button mappings, etc)
when they are transparently using other machines.  This means that
if they set the background to black with white text to read 
the text (bad eyes) and the system where an app is launched doesn't
obey it, I have a problem.

Thus I agree completely with Alan Cox in that your initial three 
statements seem largely out of step with my everyday work place.

--Karl