SNIA CIFS TR
Michael B.Allen
mballen at erols.com
Wed Jul 31 01:46:02 GMT 2002
On Tue, 30 Jul 2002 20:24:48 +1000
Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> wrote:
> > > > I wish someone
> > > > would do a real analysis and write some practical documentation.
> > >
> > > A volenteer! Great! I'll see what help I can be, but you might want to
> >
> > This is such a crappy argument. I file this one with the "if you don't like
> > it, submit a patch" argument. If someone writes some code that does X, the
> > chances of someone else, possibly much more capable, of also writing code
> > to do X decreases greatly. So now the SNIA comes up with a crappy document
> > (nice formatting; too bad it's a MS Word doc) and another group that might
> > have formed a real working group that would turn out to do some good
> > research, generate dependency graphs, maintain a bug database, etc has now
> > gone off and done something else instead.
>
> So? But this is the document the CIFS community is working with - and
> it really is the best we have - despite its' defficiencies.
>
> As to 'why SNIA'? Well, SNIA puts on the annual CIFS conference, and MS
> is a member. Given the need for MS participation in an forum that
> seriously attempts to document the protocol, and the need for a vender
> neutral body, I can certainly understand SNIA's role
I'm directing my grievances at the working group members and less so the
CIFS interests for being irresponsible. I think the attitude of SNIA
members is too optimistic for the quality of work being performed. Nothing
personal folks but this document is a turd. What makes anyone think
Microsoft will implement any changes to their servers even if Leach himself
ok's your infolevels? They won't unless they're politically motivated.
We're sitting on our hands right now and it's sad. I think MS's
participation wavered because they didn't take the WG seriously. There were
issues presented to MS that could have been resolved in some Netapp lab by
a high school intern. They should have done some real work and *then*
approched MS with *real* brain teasers like what some little mystery byte
of flags does. If you just ask general questions it's too much work for the
arrogant bastards. If the WG had asked very specific questions they would
have had much better results and added real content to the document.
There needs to be a concerted effort to identify the issues and sort out a
definitive position on each. The WG could take a tip from the W3C in this
respect. They have open forums for dicussion. Anyone can subscribe to the
various mailing lists and contribute. I didn't see *any* discussion on any
SNIA mailing list or anywhere else. When I posted a pertinent factoid I
never received a message that it was acknowledged or dismissed and why. The
W3C keeps everything freely available on Web in HTML and updates it
frequently.
I have prepared the following page as an example:
http://www.eskimo.com/~miallen/cifs/cifs-issues.html
I hope the WG considers changing their strategy because I for one think
they're making negative progress.
--
A program should be written to model the concepts of the task it
performs rather than the physical world or a process because this
maximizes the potential for it to be applied to tasks that are
conceptually similar and more importantly to tasks that have not
yet been conceived.
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