defining the new idmap subsystem

[Jeremy Allison]

On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:10:54PM -0400, simo wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 13:03 +1000, Luke Howard wrote:
> > >I think the code will be much uglier but if most want that, so be it.
> > >But I'd like some more people complaining about that, before changing.
> > 
> > I agree with Jeremy, having something done as a side-effect of an
> > interface whose primary purpose is to query seems like a bad idea
> > to me.
> 
> The problem is that the primary purpose depends on the context.
> In some cases we just want to know if a mapping exist, but don't want to
> actually trigger a mapping, in others we want to trigger a new mapping,
> but that will happen only if the backend supports it.

Then we code so that we query first, and if it fails we request
a mapping, and deal with a failure if the backend doesn't do
mappings.

We must not add allocation as a side effect. Been there, done
that - had to track down the bugs. Not doing it again :-).

Jeremy.