Re: [Vrs-development] Distributed Filesystem

[Ian Fung]

> I'd like to remind people once again that nobody has *ever* built a 
> filesystem like this.  Not NFS, not Andrew file system, not any of a 
> number of other experimental distributed filesystems I've read about.  
> There are filesystems that guarantee consistency by storing a single 
> copy of data, or a master copy plus caches.  There are filesystems 
> that guarantee accessibility by allowing many copies of the data, but 
> not guaranteeing consistency between them (the Andrew filesystem is 
> *weird*!).  There is no filesystem out there (AFAIK) that both 
> distributes the master copy of the data and guarantees Unix 
> filesystem semantics and ACID transactional properties.
> 
> I hate to be defeatist, but I honestly, honestly don't think that this 
> is a feasible project unless we get a *real* expert in distributed 
> filesystems or transaction processing on here.  And by a "real 
> expert" I mean someone who's had a few years experience implementing 
> transactional data storage at a place like Oracle, you know? :-)  I 
> think our time would probably be better spent on a more ... realistic 
> project.

i understand where you are coming from. it is a big undertaking and
there are many many issues that needs to be resolved. i think we should
outline and declare exactly what needs to happen. if someone is
interested in working on it (like me) then they can try to tackle some
of the issues. i dont know what our timeline is, but of course i would
like to contribute to vrs as a whole and not just sit in the corner and
do my own thing. it would be good for us to sit down and do an irc
session outlining all the issues around the distributed filesystem. we
can on the first iteration have not as strict of a requirement. maybe we
can start by doing a distribute file repository, with no synchronization
and consistency. and then move on from there. 

how does sometime this weekend sound? chris? let me know.

ian