cvs commit: www/en/projects/ideas ideas.xml

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Alexander Leidinger wrote:

> Quoting Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org> (from Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:56:51 
> +0000 (UTC)):
>
>> rwatson     2008-03-17 22:56:51 UTC
>>
>>  FreeBSD doc repository
>>
>>  Modified files:
>>    en/projects/ideas    ideas.xml
>>  Log:
>>  Add NFSv4 ACLs idea.
>
> The name of pjd is misspelled, the milestones should use a list, 
> s/multif-fold/<something more easy to understand for foreign people>/.

Fixed, thanks.

> Does this include the corresponding changes to chmod (Solaris has an 
> enhanced syntax for chmod so you can set NFSv4 ACLS using chmod instead of 
> setfacl). If yes it could be mentioned so that interested people have an 
> initial idea where they can look for inspiration.

The first item on the task list is looking at existing specifications and 
implementations, and that would include user management tools.  I'm not sure 
if Sun and Apple chose the same extensions to chmod or not -- I'd probably 
guess not, but both should be looked at.  Interestingly, Apple adopted parts 
of our POSIX.1e ACL library (or at least, its man pages) for supporting ACLs 
in applications, which surprised me as I felt that POSIX.1e ACLs and 
NTFS/NFSv4 ACLs were sufficiently different to make that somewhat difficult.

> We may want to add the "Difficulty" part which was introduced in the passive 
> libpcap based TCP session anomaly detector entry.

This is either a long task or a difficult task, but I think it's one even 
someone relatively new to kernel programming could work their way through. 
Implementing POSIX.1e ACLs was one of my first projects for the FreeBSD 
kernel, and while I have quite a bit more insight into ACLs now than I did 
then, I think it would still be relatively accessible given appropriate 
mentoring.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge