Convenience interface for adjusting ACLs? ACL file namespacing?

[Brian Swetland]

I can learn about ACLs with upspin info or upspin share, but it seems like (unless I missed something), I have to manually prepare/modify/etc Access or Group files to adjust them.  It'd be nice if the upspin command had an upspin-ish equivalent to chown/chmod to let me more conveniently adjust the ACLs.

Related, it strikes me a bit odd that the ACL files are common English words that could conceivably collide with user files.  Was there consideration given to "namespacing" the metadata files so they'd be a bit more distinct (maybe with a simple rarely-used character like comma?)  I see the value of having metadata be simple files but think there'd also be value in making it less likely to collide with non-metadata uses.

[Rob Pike]

Please file an issue for the ACL question. It will require careful design of course. Personally, I'm happy for now to stick to editing text files, but I understand that may have to change.

Regarding the access control files, all those issues were thought about but we decided to keep it simple. Our target is regular users and funny characters are not friendly to regular users. Still, we are certainly aware of the possibilities for collisions. We also worry about the parochial nature of English words here.

-rob

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 9:38 PM, 'Brian Swetland' via Upspin <ups...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I can learn about ACLs with upspin info or upspin share, but it seems like (unless I missed something), I have to manually prepare/modify/etc Access or Group files to adjust them.  It'd be nice if the upspin command had an upspin-ish equivalent to chown/chmod to let me more conveniently adjust the ACLs.

Related, it strikes me a bit odd that the ACL files are common English words that could conceivably collide with user files.  Was there consideration given to "namespacing" the metadata files so they'd be a bit more distinct (maybe with a simple rarely-used character like comma?)  I see the value of having metadata be simple files but think there'd also be value in making it less likely to collide with non-metadata uses.

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[Brian Swetland]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 10:26 PM, Rob Pike <r...@golang.org> wrote:

Please file an issue for the ACL question. It will require careful design of course. Personally, I'm happy for now to stick to editing text files, but I understand that may have to change.

Willdo.

 

Regarding the access control files, all those issues were thought about but we decided to keep it simple. Our target is regular users and funny characters are not friendly to regular users. Still, we are certainly aware of the possibilities for collisions. We also worry about the parochial nature of English words here.

I think from a "regular user" standpoint, a command to adjust ACLs is probably friendlier than explaining how to modify specially (if simply) formatted text files.  I've seen plenty of havoc wrought by the mis-editing of /etc/passwd, /etc/group, .htaccess and the like files over the years.

I've been using the upspin command exclusively so far.  I imagine it's a bit more convenient to make small changes with the FUSE filesystem approach (though I'm curious how Access file content errors are reported in that model).