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On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 14:37 +0100, Brew, CAJ (Chris) wrote: > Hi All, > > This came up briefly in the face to face and maybe if we have an agreed > list we can push we can get something done about them. My ¤0.02 doesn't cover specific implementation issues, but rather meta-problems associated with the design and implementation of the software suite itself. In no particular order: Portability. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Source code for every component should be portable and readily available; if I want to build my own binaries or packages for my preferred flavour of Linux/Unix then it should be easy for me to do. RHEL4 and variants aren't supported yet, which by itself is worrying -- but replicating the build process for the entire LCG stack is, just by itself, really hard. (Just _finding_ the source code that corresponds to each binary package is non-trivial; even then, a lot of the source just Doesn't Work Out Of The Box -- my recent attempt to build VOMS on Solaris is a good example.[0]) Reinventing the wheel, or The Right Tool for the Right Job. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- GSI and VOMS do pretty much the same job Kerberos has been doing for a couple of decades. LCAS does pretty much the same thing as PAM has been doing for years. The conventional domain name system could be used to replace MDS. The various logical file catalogs do pretty much the same thing as a BitTorrent tracker. The various file-transfer tools -- GridFTP, srmcp et al -- seem to do pretty much the same thing as scp or BitTorrent. Why develop and deploy all of these grid-specific tools -- many of which are not mature -- when existing generic tools (many of which are already well-understood and deployed) already exist? Okay, so this is only two things.. I'm still thinking about how best to express the other 3. Cheers, David [0] http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/wiki/DPM-on-Solaris#VOMS -- David McBride <[log in to unmask]> Department of Computing, Imperial College, London