Re: [9fans] Sources Gone?

["Roman V. Shaposhnik" <rvs@sun.com>]

On Tue, 2009-02-03 at 19:27 +0200, lucio@proxima.alt.za wrote:
> But I do not recall the details and I think Roman is the one who
> needs to recap this discussion and bring it to a conclusion.

Wow! This ended up being quite a thread ;-) I'll try to comment on
a couple of things first, in this single email, and then try to
recap:

erik> if you want users, groups and access control, isn't the fs the
erik> place to go?  i'm trying to see how doing fsey things at the
erik> venti level would be useful, but i don't see it yet.

Yes, as I pointed in my prior reply to you the access control
sure does belong to the FS. But...

roger> the attraction, for me at any rate, is that certain operations
roger> are really cheap and easy in venti, but expensive in the fs.
roger> cloning/copying a multi-gigabyte tree being the canonical
roger> example.

...if you completely firewall venti by the fossil, you can longer get
the benefits roger is talking about (and these benefits is precisely
what I'm after). Essentially, replica of a venti-backed fossils is
only needed because there's no way to get to venti. All you see
is an FS interface.

Now, this conversation made me realize that since there has to be a
proxy anyway (just as Anthony, I'm not fully convinced by roger's
proposal) and since most of what this proxy needs to care about is
FSish type of things may be the answer is extending fossil, not
venti. IOW, augmenting fossil with a set of API that would let two
ventis exchange filesystem blocks, but only as long as the user is
authorized to do so.

This takes care of Erik's remark that venti doesn't know what's in
the blocks. Sure it doesn't. But now fossil (as a proxy) does.

Thanks,
Roman.