Re: Ev2 and Authz

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_btopenworld.com> wrote:

> We should be very cautious about proposing an apparently "simple" special case like that.  A file has properties and
> text content; a directory has properties and children; that's how it is in Subversion.  Saying that a user should be able
> to read part of a directory (its properties) and not the other part (its children) is breaking that relatively simple abstraction,
> and breaking abstractions in that way makes complications for all other software layers that try to build on top of the
> foundation, not to mention for the users' mental models.  At first hearing, it doesn't sound like there could be any major
> repercussions, but after a while I suspect we might regret it.

I do not think the area here is as gray as you might. After all,
today we basically force people to essentially do the same thing by
adding a lot of rules to mimic it.

[repos:/]
* = r

[repos:/project1]
* =

[repos:/project1/someFolder]
* = rw

[repos:/project2]
* =

[repos:/project3]
* =

The proposal would be to save the user from not needing to add these
rules to get the same behavior.

There is of course still some gray area in that today the user has to
go out of the way to write these rules, so they are in control. But
if they create the rules, it seems like our code already know how to
handle them.

-- 
Thanks
Mark Phippard
http://markphip.blogspot.com/