[cap-talk] MinorFS presentation.

[David-Sarah Hopwood]

Rob Meijer wrote:
> On Mon, June 1, 2009 21:01, Karp, Alan H wrote:
>> Slide 11: I'm not sure that global mutable state violates POLA as much as
>> it makes it virtually impossible to enforce.
> 
> I may have beem to strong a statement, I've toned it down a bit to
> "High potential for violating the principle of least authority"

Global mutable state that is accessible to all processes is by itself
a violation of POLA, since processes shouldn't be able to communicate
unless granted authority to do so.

It's also a reliability and maintenance problem. The most awful API I/we
have ever had the misfortune to use, derived a large part of its awfulness
from using the Windows registry to communicate what should have been
local function parameters. The registry is of course global to the
Windows installation, not just the particular process -- and the more
global the state is, the harder it is to isolate components in order to
test or understand them properly.

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood  ⚥  http://davidsarah.livejournal.com