[COFF] [TUHS] Re: Be there a "remote diff" utility?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 09:45:38AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 7:51???AM John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:
> > [snip]
> > This appears to be a VHS vs. Betamax battle: NFS was not transparent, but Sun had far more marketing clout.  However, the Manchester Connection required a single uid space (as far as I can tell), which may also have been a (perceived) institutional barrier.
> 
> So did NFS, for that matter.
> 
> This is one of those areas where Unix appears creaky in comparison to
> Plan 9. `ssh` is all about remote access to resources, whereas plan 9
> was all about resource sharing: you'd set up a namespace with all of
> the resources (exposed as files from wherever they ultimately came
> from) you cared about, and then operate on those "locally"; the
> resources were shared with you and access was transparent, via a
> consistent, file-based interface. You want to `diff` two remote files?
> Import the filesystems they're both on, mount those somewhere, and
> `diff /n/host1/file /n/host2/file`.

If you are all trusting, behind a firewall, like the Sun campus was:

diff /net/host1/file /net/host2/file

Seems pretty darn similar and you don't set up a namespace other than
saying what you want to share in /etc/exports.

Seems far from creaky to me, no root access required (other than setting
up /etc/exports), any user can access any exported file.  I was at Sun
and it worked great.  Granted, you needed a working NFS implementation
and when I left Sun I found that Sun was really the only place that got
that right in the 1990's.  Linux has caught up, don't know about the
rest.

--lm