[Xgridagent-development] Tiger, use of howl

[Travis B. <tr...@be...>]

I finally got my Xserve upgraded to Tiger, although it was hell  
(somehow Tiger broke KDE on some of my BSD machines that NFS-mount  
home directories from the xserve). Now, it seems that xgridagent  
won't talk to the new controller. Matthew, are you running Tiger  
Server successfully as a controller for a grid containing Xgridagent  
agents? Daniel implied that this wouldn't work, and I'm inclined to  
agree with him, although I may just have missed something. Does  
anyone know how much work is involved in making xgridagent compatible  
again?

As a minor consideration for future planning, it looks like there are  
some license issues with Howl that indirectly affect us. Basically, a  
number of linux distributions (Debian, for example) don't like the  
patent clause in the APSL, and so won't include Howl. People can  
always download and compile Howl themselves, but that's a bit  
inconvenient.  See this email:

http://lists.porchdogsoft.com/pipermail/howl-users/2005-April/ 
000614.html

There are apparently other mDNS / ZeroConf implementations (e.g.  
Avahi) either available or under development that do not have these  
issues. Long-term, we should perhaps consider switching to one of  
them. It doesn't seem that Avahi is quite ready for primetime yet,  
though, so we should stick with Howl for now.

-Travis