[Gluster-Maintainers] Proposal to change gNFS status

[Kaleb Keithley]

Independent of anything else—

Maintain it. Send patches to gerrit. Get the requisite +2 reviews on the
patches. Amar still has commit privs AFAIK; he can merge anything that gets
two votes.

It's open source meritocracy.

If there's real support for it then it makes a stronger case for adding it
back to the community packages.

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 4:14 PM Kaleb Keithley <kkeithle at redhat.com> wrote:

> I personally wouldn't call three years ago — when we started to deprecate
> it, in glusterfs-3.9 — a recent change.
>
> As a community the decision was made to move to NFS-Ganesha as the
> preferred NFS solution, but it was agreed to keep the old code in the tree
> for those who wanted it. There have been plans to drop it from the
> community packages for most of those three years, but we didn't follow
> through across the board until fairly recently. Perhaps the most telling
> piece of data is that it's been gone from the packages in the CentOS
> Storage SIG in glusterfs-4.0, -4.1, -5, -6, and -7 with no complaints ever,
> that I can recall.
>
> Ganesha is a preferable solution because it supports NFSv4, NFSv4.1,
> NFSv4.2, and pNFS, in addition to legacy NFSv3. More importantly, it is
> actively developed, maintained, and supported, both in the community and
> commercially. There are several vendors selling it, or support for it; and
> there are community packages for it for all the same distributions that
> Gluster packages are available for.
>
> Out in the world, the default these days is NFSv4. Specifically v4.2 or
> v4.1 depending on how recent your linux kernel is. In the linux kernel,
> client mounts start negotiating for v4.2 and work down to v4.1, v4.0, and
> only as a last resort v3. NFSv3 client support in the linux kernel largely
> exists at this point only because of the large number of legacy servers
> still running that can't do anything higher than v3. The linux NFS
> developers would drop the v3 support in a heartbeat if they could.
>
> IMO, providing it, and calling it maintained, only encourages people to
> keep using a dead end solution. Anyone in favor of bringing back NFSv2,
> SSHv1, or X10R4? No? I didn't think so.
>
> The recent issue[1] where someone built gnfs in glusterfs-7.0 on CentOS7
> strongly suggests to me that gnfs is not actually working well. Three years
> of no maintenance seems to have taken its toll.
>
> Other people are more than welcome to build their own packages from the
> src.rpms and/or tarballs that are available from gluster — and support
> them. It's still in the source and there are no plans to remove it. (Unlike
> most of the other deprecated features which were recently removed in
> glusterfs-7.)
>
>
>
> [1] https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/issues/764
>
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 5:31 AM Amar Tumballi <amarts at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> As per the discussion on https://review.gluster.org/23645, recently we
>> changed the status of gNFS (gluster's native NFSv3 support) feature to
>> 'Depricated / Orphan' state. (ref:
>> https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/master/MAINTAINERS#L185..L189).
>> With this email, I am proposing to change the status again to 'Odd Fixes'
>> (ref: https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/master/MAINTAINERS#L22)
>>
>> TL;DR;
>>
>> I understand the current maintainers are not able to focus on maintaining
>> it as the focus of the project, as earlier described, is keeping
>> NFS-Ganesha based integration with glusterfs. But, I am volunteering along
>> with Xie Changlong (currently working at Chinamobile), to keep the feature
>> running as it used to in previous versions. Hence the status of 'Odd
>> Fixes'.
>>
>> Before sending the patch to make these changes, I am proposing it here
>> now, as gNFS is not even shipped with latest glusterfs-7.0 releases. I have
>> heard from some users that it was working great for them with earlier
>> releases, as all they wanted was NFS v3 support, and not much of features
>> from gNFS. Also note that, even though the packages are not built, none of
>> the regression tests using gNFS are stopped with latest master, so it is
>> working same from at least last 2 years.
>>
>> I request the package maintainers to please add '--with gnfs' (or
>> --enable-gnfs) back to their release script through this email, so those
>> users wanting to use gNFS happily can continue to use it. Also points to
>> users/admins is that, the status is 'Odd Fixes', so don't expect any
>> 'enhancements' on the features provided by gNFS.
>>
>> Happy to hear feedback, if any.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Amar
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> maintainers mailing list
>> maintainers at gluster.org
>> https://lists.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/maintainers
>>
>
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