Cross-rpcgen patch, version 6

[Andreas Jaeger]

On 05/09/2012 08:09 PM, Roland McGrath wrote:
>> On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Andreas Jaeger<aj@suse.com>  wrote:
>>> I wouldn't mind reverting the removal in glibc and including sunrpc again
>>> since there's no replacement yet. ;-(
>>
>> I believe that this should be done sooner rather than later e.g. 2.16
>> or 2.17 timeframe.
>>
>> My feeling is that it was a premature removal. We should have had
>> overlap before removing the code from glibc.
>
> I do agree that it was done hastily and could have been handled better.
> But it's my view that what's done is done and we should move forward rather
> than backward.  The distribution maintainers who have undone the change in
> their forks don't have any trouble continuing to do so for another release.

They won't have - unless somebody starts cleaning up the code even more. 
If we keep the status quo, we should have an agreement not to break the 
situation even further.

> Since what we're talking about is getting TI-RPC to be able to do what code
> with related lineage was capable of 25 years ago, I cannot believe that the
> work involved there is all that much.  The fact that nobody can be bothered
> to do it by a year later is just more evidence that nobody really cares
> about sunrpc, and that says to me we should be straining in the direction
> of dropping it rather than in the direction of retaining API support for
> something so obsolete and unloved.

AFAIK the two large rpc users are NFS and NIS. TI-RPC is used today by 
the NFSv4 code but not usable for NIS at all. And NIS is IMO fading out 
as well but still in use... I even suggested dropping NIS but didn't 
succeed ;-(

> If the absence is really so much trouble for anyone, that should be impetus
> for them to contribute the work TI-RPC needs to do its job adequately.
 >
> I'm clearly in the minority here and I'm not going to make a big stink
> about it, but I firmly think that the notion of reverting the removal is
> the wrong thing to do.

The problem is that everybody is patching it in. We could add a 
configure option to enable building against it - that would send the 
message out as well that its obsolete.

Andreas
-- 
  Andreas Jaeger aj@{suse.com,opensuse.org} Twitter/Identica: jaegerandi
   SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
    GF: Jeff Hawn,Jennifer Guild,Felix Imendörffer,HRB16746 (AG Nürnberg)
     GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F  FED1 389A 563C C272 A126