Hello Ivan,

Thank you for setting me straight on some coda items. In particular, I had 
not thought through the implications of an individual having access to 
space directly under /coda.  In the case of IBM using AFS, the universe is 
small enough so that a central administrator can set up symbolic links 
directly under /afs.  You make it clear that AFS and coda are different 
systems -- see my problem in the next paragraph...

A problem is that the documents I am using are the Administrator's Manual 
from 2000 and the HowTo from 1999.  I did not see newer documents on the 
coda web site and maybe this is because there has been no time with a huge 
amount of development activity occuring.  Or I looked in the wrong place.

>I'd rather solve the "short prompt" with some magic that substitutes
>/coda/your.realm.dns.name/ say with MYCODA/ in your prompt.

I did that at IBM where even /afs/lair/u/burts was too long for my comfort 
(we used primarily AIX with Korn shell; at least by default ksh didn't 
have the TAB character typeahead common in bash.)  But I broke a useful 
feature in the process of using our build tools.  Building code, I ended 
up automatically creating lots of "MYAFS/..." objects. We had a Open 
Source Foundation Development Environment setup (ODE) that allowed a 
series of backing builds (Gwen backs off of Burt backs off of the primary 
backing build.) So Gwen tried that and her system did not know what to do 
with "MYAFS/".  I think I caused her a headache!

>Besides that, Coda tools (say conflict resolution ones) are far from
>being intuitive.

I'll bet that's true even with a user manual.  But I already asked about 
that above!

>given a lot of care and education,
>and certainly a lot of your time helping them when something goes wrong.

After years of using AFS, I never managed to solve the ".: not found" 
(something like that) problem, where parts of the filesystem disappear.  I 
ran into that same thing with coda when I made that mistake of accessing 
the same thing through 2 different paths. Usually it required restarting 
the AFS client, and with AIX that meant rebooting the box. That issue 
worries me about coda, but maybe it will not ever happen if I never access 
something through two different paths!?

Best,

Burt