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

[John Carlson]

On Sep 10, 2008, at 7:56 AM, John Carlson wrote:

>
> 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.
>
> Perhaps the directory could be created based on a searches?  What  
> determines what can be searched, and does searching require ambient  
> authority?

For example, it wouldn't be hard for me to give you authority to every  
file in my home folder with the string Carlson in it.  It wouldn't  
even be that hard to maintain the namespaces involved either, without  
granting full access to the original namespaces.

$ find ~carlson | sed 's/ /\\ /g'|xargs grep -l Carlson

What are your use-cases that are performance prohibitive and  
complexity prohibitive?  Something on the web?

John