Arla 0.8 and .@sys

[David Morrison]

Dear drinkers,

I have a RedHat5.1 system, kernel 2.1.109, and have just installed arla-0.8. 
Nearly everything seems to be working just fine, with one odd exception.  In
several places in my directory hierarchy, I use symbolic links to ". at sys" as a
way of handling a variety of platforms without cluttering up a directory with a
bunch of visible sysname'ed links.  This works fine when using Transarc AFS
clients.  However, the "." in front of "@sys" seems to be throwing arla off the
scent.  In perusing the code, it looks like the problem may be caused by
`cm_lookup' in inter.c near line 457 which reads

      if (strcmp(name, "@sys") == 0)
	 name = arlasysname;

Any component of a filename which reads _exactly_ "@sys" will be translated to
sysname properly, but any extra chars (like the "." I like to put in front of
"@sys") foils the translation.  A colleague wrote a routine to translate the
first occurrence of "@sys" to sysname whatever other chars appear in name, but
it didn't seem to completely solve the problem.  In any case, I don't know
absolutely for sure that this piece of code is the source of the problem I'm
seeing and besides I think a proper solution should handle more perverse uses of
"@sys" in filenames.

I'm willing to look into this a bit further if this is the right track to
pursue.  I'd also be happy to pass along the mods we made if someone else would
prefer to check into it.

Thanks,
Dave
 
-- 
David Morrison  Brookhaven National Laboratory  phone: 516-344-5840
                Physics Department, Bldg 510 C    fax: 516-344-3253
		          Upton, NY 11973-5000  email: dave at bnl.gov