Arla-timeline/history
=====================

Arla have existed for quite some years.

Development started around XXX by Björn Grönvall <bg@nada.kth.se>,
quick followers was Assar <assar@sics.se> (at that time
<assar@pdc.kth.se>) and Johan Danielsson <joda@pdc.kth.se>. The
platform that was chosen was Sparc SunOS4 (the OS that NADA, KTH was
using).

Some work was being done by Patrik Stymne <patriks@e.kth.se> in
porting arla to Ultrix, but this work was never finished.

At this time there was no free rx, lwp or rxkad. A basic rx
implementation was written, and the threading problem was solved by
using pthreads.

The Arla development started to slow down around 11 April 1995.

In September 1997, an rxkad implementation was written by Björn. At
the same time, a need for an AFS client for OpenBSD rose at the
Stacken, the local computer club at KTH. Other free OS:es, as NetBSD,
FreeBSD and Linux(primarily sparc) were also in need of AFS clients.

In TokKOM, a local communications system using LysKOM
(<http://www.lysator.liu.se/lyskom/>), Assar suggested to some club
members that it would be a nice thing to resume the arla
development.

Some people suggested that it would be less trouble having someone
with access to the Transarc AFS source code port the code to the
relevent platforms. Assar then ported xfs to FreeBSD 2.2.x in notime,
just to show the high portability.

People started to understand that arla was a concept that would work,
and first out was Love Hörnqvist-Åstrand <lha@stacken.kth.se> to
join. Development was primarily aimed at OpenBSD and NetBSD at the
moment, and Arla lived for at least 2-3 weeks in /var/tmp on a host
named yakko.stacken.kth.se.

Magnus Ahltorp <map@stacken.kth.se> joined shortly thereafter,
spending the rest of the year reading about the Linux VFS, and after a
while, Artur Grabowski <art@stacken.kth.se> also started to work on
arla, concentrating on OpenBSD kernel stuff.

The first entry in ChangeLog is dated Fri Oct 24 17:20:40 1997. Around
this time arla was given a CVS tree, to ease development. Now you
could also mount the xfs-device and get the root-directory out of it.

The Linux port was done in a few weeks in the beginning of 1998. Only
the Linux 2.0 kernel was supported at this time.

In April 1998 Assar hade a Arla paper presented at Freenix. Linux 2.1
support was written also written around this time. This was a major
work since there was a lot of stuff that had changed (namely the
dcache).

The first milko entry is dated Thu Oct 30 01:46:51 1997. Note that
this milko in a sense "worked". You could get files out from it and
store them.

There was from this point a lot of work being done and quite a lot of
studies was "wasted". We learned a lot, but not the stuff we were
expected too.

In Mars 2000 preliminary support for MacOS X/Darwin 1.0 was merged in
by Magnus and Assar.

Around the same time there we hacked in support for Solaris 8 (beta2)
There was also some work being done on Windows 2000 native driver at
same time.

This just includes some milestones, for more information se
Changelog.* and NEWS files in the distribution.

-------

Current involved in the project is:

Assar Westerlund <assar@sics.se> (mostly everything)
Love Hörnquist-Åstrand <lha@s3.kth.se> (mostly everything)
Magnus Ahltorp <map@stacken.kth.se> (Linux, Darwin(MacOSX), Arlad, milko stuff)
Artur Grabowski <art@stacken.kth.se> (OpenBSD)
Robert Burgess <rb@stacken.kth.se> (Solaris)
Mikael Vidstedt <mikeee@stacken.kth.se> (userland, some milko stuff)
Johan Danielsson <joda@pdc.kth.se> (OSF/1)
Harald Barth  <haba@pdc.kth.se> (documentation)

Rhapsody xfs port was contributed by Alexandra Ellwood <lxs@MIT.EDU>

Disconnected code is written by:

WUWEI SHEN <wwshen@engin.umich.edu>
Cheng Jin <chengjin@eecs.umich.edu>
Paul Callaway <pcallawa@umich.edu>


For more contributors look in the THANKS file in the distribution on
<ftp://ftp.stacken.kth.se/pub/arla/>.

