Making nALFS network aware (client/server model)

[gerard@…]

This is a wishlist item:

Making nALFS network aware. the one huge advantage it would have is that you can have one profile being run on a whole bunch of machines at once. Right now I create a profile, put it in CVS, run it locally. Login (console or ssh whatever works best) onto different machine, cvs up profiles, run the modified profile on that system. Login to yet another machine, repeat.

Or:

Make profile, select which machines it affects, run it, nALFS will connect to other machines and run them.

This feature has been discussed a long time ago, something used to exist as a proof of concept but it's gone for the moment. Is there a chance you guys like this feature or will consider it for the future? If not, I'd better brush up on my network programming skills (and I got just the perfect book to teach me that too, if I can find the time).

[neven@…]

This is definitely planned. I did started nALFS trying to keep the frontend/backend code as much separated as possible, hoping for an easy separation later on (using socketpair(), frontend<->backend communication with "messages" etc.).

However, there are still quite a few "little things" to be improved, so that this split can happen. The main one being the fact that a lot of information given to backend is now simply a result of a fork(). So better communication between the two has to be established.

Anyway, this is quite a bug (do I hear 2.x.x ? ;-), but it will be a fun thing to do, so I'm going to deal with it eventually.

[jwrober@…]

This is both front and back, so made an extra

[jamie@…]

As Neven isn't around anymore I'm removing him as assignee. This enhancement won't happen for nALFS but will be a part of nALFS2.

[Pierre Labastie]

{n,}ALFS is not developped anymore