Re: exact semantics of union mounts (and TRYEMULROOT)

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 02:27:59PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
 > > No, it doesn't.  Union mounts were invented by Plan 9 and the Plan 9
 > > behavior is the normative reference.
 > 
 > Then why are you asking here?  Why not ask on a Plan 9 list?

Because I'm talking about NetBSD and NetBSD's implementation?

 > I see no reason NetBSD's union mounts have to, nor even should, be
 > identical, or even as close to identical as the rest of the system can
 > support, to Plan 9's union mounts.

...maybe because Plan 9 invented union mounts and the reason we have
them is that somebody thought it would be a good idea to have the same
feature?

(the first time someone thought that, we got onionfs, so somebody else
went back and did it mostly correctly)

 > some relatively obscure OS most of them have likely
 > never heard of

Should we have an arbitrarily different, i.e. wrong, implementation
of, say, telnet, because it originally came from some relatively
obscure OS most people now have likely never heard of? SunRPC? NFS?
OpenGL?

Don't be silly.

 > > Vague and ambiguous statements in our man pages aren't particularly
 > > helpful.
 > 
 > Denigratory adjectives aside (I found the statements I quoted neither
 > vague nor ambiguous),

If they were neither vague nor ambiguous relative to the
implementation details I'm concerned about, I'd not have bothered
asking.

In fact, I probably shouldn't have bothered anyway, as so far this
thread has not really produced any useful information.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost