Re: "Official" gnome window manager

["J. Patrick Narkinsky" <patrick amphigory tez net>]

On Sat, 14 Feb 1998, Urmane Hendrake wrote:

> >  Because people don't usually export home directories (via NFS) over the
> > Internet.  LDAP is a *great* candidate for just exporting config files to
> > a gnome-compliant machine.  I would really not want to run NFS on my
> > machines just to export an environment.
> 
> Wrap the filesystem(s) in CORBA and implement a security service and
> avoid LDAP and NFS.  Not easy (not even close), but how would people
> react when you say, "Oh, yeah, GNOME lets you keep your environment
> no matter where on the 'net you log in: home, work, laptop, whatever."
> Not directly related to gnome proper; perhaps an associated project
> could be formed.

Well, when you get right down to it, there are two problems: one is an
authentification model and one is a directory model.  LDAP provides a
directory model -- I tend to think, if nothing else, that we will
(eventually) need an LDAP tag that will define a unique identifier
describing the config to use for user "x".  e.g., we might do something
like the following:
	cn=Patrick Narkinsky
	sn=Narkinsky
	gnomeconfig=http://wiggle.net/whatever
	etc.
Notice that I don't suggest that we put actual config information in LDAP
-- just a pointer to it.  My reason for this is that 1) Directory
services, while a worth project, is really outside the scope of GNOME 2)
People LIKE flat-file configuration -- it's very easy to modify.  This
way, users can just modify their flat files and point LDAP at it.

Note that it should be possible to implement LDAP withing GNOME using the
VFS code -- there is already a LDAP:// URL syntax defined.  (Although I
must admit that I don't know exactly what the structure is -- haven't been
doing much with LDAP since it was defined.).  The idea would be to provide
facilities within the local gnome site config to include a remote config
-- which could be either the remote config itself or an LDAP URL to
retrieve a pointer to the config.  (i.e., in the above example, it could
be either ldap:///cn=Patrick Narkinsky/gnomeconfig (in which case the
correct URL would be fetched) or http://wiggle.net/whatever).

As far as a security model, I suspect that kerberos would be a good start,
but this is WAY out of GNOME's province.

My $0.25.  Inflation sucks.

Patrick


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J. Patrick Narkinsky | God doesn't like intellectual slackers any
                     | better than he likes any other kind of slacker.
                     |                          - C.S. Lewis
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