Re: [Helidelinux-devel] Linux registry

[Hui Z. <zh...@wa...>]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 05:01:31PM +0000, Rolf Veen wrote:
> My (old) idea was to create a /data directory and
> a dpath command so that we could have:
I don't see the reason why you have to put everything into a specific
folder. The root directory info can be the root node of the path
construction, so dpath will always know where to look.
> 
> # dpath system.hostname
> # dpath pkg.apache.conf.DocRoot
> 
> The dpath would map paths to directory/OGDL files inside
> /data. It also could dive into executables, if it finds
> one along the path (if a path element corresponds to an
> executable, asume it will print OGDL to stdout, and
> continue from there).
I am thinking on that. There must be some schemes so dpath can tell
easily whether a text file is an ogdl file and an binary is safe to
execute and produce ogdl stream. Otherwise, how can it prevent it from
executing wrong binary and crashing the system or corrupting the data?
> 
> There are two approaches to get the data:
> 
> 1) Publish the data that you want to be accesible thru
>    dpath in /data (by means of a symlink for example).
>    Example: system.conf -> /data/system/conf/
> 
> 2) Filter some paths to different system locations, as
>    Example: users.nobody -> /home/nobody/data/
>    Example 2: user.mail.conf -> $HOME/data/mail/conf
> 
> The second approach only needs a series of rules in dpath
> while the second needs that the package manager takes care
> of placing the appropiate symlinks into the /data space.
I don't quite like the idea of creating extra non-standard
directories. The `data' can be all different purpose. Config data
should go to /etc, user specific data should go to home dirs.
Maybe you are actually thinking collecting all data into a central 
place, but my opinion is not to exert extra rules unless necessary.
With above mentioned API, whether putting data in a single directory
or putting them seperately will work under a universal API. As an
example:
# dpath /etc/system.hostname or dpath etc.system.hostname
# dpath /home/nobody/mail.conf or dpath home.nobody.mail.conf 

And as an alternative, how does a data base compared with registry?
> 
> Regarding security, I guess we should left that to the
> file system (which after all probably has ACL as an option).
What is ACL?
> 

-Hui