[Tfug] Naming scheme

[Bexley Hall]

Hi, Stephen,

--- Stephen Hooper <stephen.hooper at gmail.com> wrote:

> The problem is not really that unsolvable... just
> keep track of things
> marked public, and communicate them between
> applications.  The name space becomes completely
> incidental.
 
The bookkeeping is the easy part -- it's a "solved
problem".  OTOH, the naming *scheme* is the real
problem.

Context:  Imagine walking into Bentleys (etc.)
and having every PDA, iPod, "whatever" in the
building accessible (i.e. the "public portions"
thereof) to *you* on *your* PDA, iPod, etc.

The advantage of such a scheme is that you can
ON YOUR OWN (without requiring the assistance of
each "publisher") fetch whatever information you
want from each of those devices/users.

E.g., you could harvest their "contact information",
look at their bookmarked web sites, listen to their
"favorite tunes", etc.  WITHOUT having to ask them,
"Hey, could you 'send' me your ________?"

(I hope this concept is obvious...)

Now, how do you "address" each of those discrete
users/devices in *your* namespace?  The
machine-friendly approach is to have each user's
objects appear under a "unique identifier" that
is the equivalent of the MAC assigned to each of
these devices (which, presumably, is guaranteed by the
manufacturer to be unique).

Unfortunately, this is not the *intuitive* way of
doing it.  People would rather see the *names* of
these people instead of some obscure "identifier".
E.g., I would rather find /users/Stephen.Hooper
than /users/12884353 (though one could always adopt
a convention of putting the user's "name" *under*
the identifier in terms of the hierarchy.  I.e.
/users/12884353/identification would contain
the string "Stephen Hooper").

The problem is, if you do things the user friendly
way, then you can end up with lots of conflicts in
the name space.  I.e. all the users who decide they
just want to identify themselves as "Bob", etc.

The problem is there is no naming authority that
ensures the uniqueness of names (other than relying
on some hardware-specific mechanism like a MAC
address, etc.)

Hence, I don't think it *is* "solvable" by its
very nature.  The best approach I can come up with
is the indirect scheme -- register the device in
the namespace using it's unique identifier (e.g., MAC)
and then put the "user defined" identification
*under* (subservient) this for perusal.  There,
conflicts are avoided since this is now the user's
own *personal* namespace...

Have I added any clarity?  Or, just obfuscation?
:<


> If every time I ran chmod 666 on a file, it were to
> write the name
> (inode, or whatever) to a file then I
> could take that file, and publish it as a list of
> public available
> files in a specified place.  If other pieces of
> software  (apps,
> filesystems, or whatever) wanted to, they could
> simply come by and
> pick up that file, and use it to find all "public"
> files.
> 
> If you really need a unique identifier, then you
> would probably want
> to run a hash, but it won't be grokable by humans. 
> It should never
> really have to be though... that is what numbers are
> for: all you
> should ever need is a way of translating a name into
> a unique
> number... putting serial numbers on your devices,
> and using those as
> part of a publishing scheme would probably be good
> enough.
> 
> It is of course more difficult the more access
> granularity you were to
> add.  Then you would also want to ensure some kind
> of cross checks to
> make sure who people say they are is who they are.
> 
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