[cap-talk] Applications for a capability platform

[James A. Donald]

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
 > The net effect of this is that the application is
 > oblivious to the fact that it runs within a capability
 > environment, and no "caplib" is required. A major
 > point of PLASH is that application re-engineering is
 > not required.
 >
 > That said, however, I think we can then start to look
 > at hybrid solutions that would augment PLASH with
 > things like a power box. These would require
 > source-level modification of the applications or their
 > runtime libraries (e.g. Gnome), but such modifications
 > would be well-localized within the respective
 > applications.

As I understand it, Plash hooks the file menu, among
other things, and the success of this depends on the
application using the standard file menu in the standard
way.  It would not be terribly difficult to modify
applications to call a powerbox file menu, instead of
hooking the standard call, if the powerbox file menu was
sufficiently compatible with the existing file menu.

Not all applications can be fixed by this kind of
powerbox, and not all application functionality can be
enabled by this kind of powerbox.  The remaining five
percent of functionality is likely to take ninety nine
percent of the effort.

In other posts I have argued that ninety five percent of
the remaining five percent can be dealt with by a
project management powerbox, which manages files
containing lists of files.  "opening a project" then
grants the applications listed in the project file
capability to access the files listed in the project
file, which capabilities cease to function when the
project is closed.