[cap-talk] More Heresey: ACLs not inherently bad

[John Carlson]

On Sep 10, 2008, at 3:30 AM, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 20:30 -0700, Charles Landau wrote:
>> Jed Donnelley wrote:
>>> Sorry - I was clear on that.  I shouldn't have included the leaf
>>> object in the above <> (see below as to what I was thinking).  What
>>> I don't understand is how such a directory-like object distinguishes
>>> between a fetch by the "new process" from a fetch by some other
>>> process (old process).  Are you imagining some Horton-like mechanism
>>> where the relevant processes get different capabilities to the
>>> directory-like object so that the directory-like object can
>>> distinguish the fetches?
>>
>> Each time you pass a different set of capabilities to a process, you
>> construct a new directory-like object that will give access to that  
>> set.
>> So in general, different processes will receive capabilities to
>> different directory-like objects. It needn't use Horton.
>
> This is precisely the operation that is both performance prohibitive  
> and
> (human) complexity prohibitive. It will turn out that humans can't  
> make
> the necessary decisions to decide what goes in to those directories.


This is a little tongue in cheek, but perhaps a directory is a little  
like a crisp-set, and we should be considering a fuzzy set for what  
goes in the directory.  Would it be any easier for a human to define a  
fuzzy set?

Perhaps capabilities should be reconsidered using the ideas from fuzzy  
systems?  Has anyone done this?

If the system knows more about the files than just crisp filenames  
(say there was some metadata), the user may be able to get help from  
the metadata.

John