Slashdot Mirror
Introducing the Mockup Project
Pier Luigi Fiorini writes "The Mockup project is a desktop operating system based on GNU/Linux. It has recently released new source code and published both screenshots and mockups. Read the announcement to know where are the source code tarballs and how to compile them. Mockup uses a new lightweight and modern graphical user interface that supports both pixel and vector based graphics. The GUI is based on bleeding edge technologies like Qt 4.0 beta, Elektra, HAL and DBUS. Elektra is a new backend for text configuration files.
Instead of each program to have its own text configuration files, with a variety of formats, Elektra tries to provide a universal, hierarchical, fast and consistent namespace and infrastructure to access configuration parameters through a key-value pair mechanism. This way any software can read/save its configuration/state using a consistent API."
Sounds to me more like Mac OS X's preferences system (accessed on the command line through the defaults utility).
Read the fine website: http://elektra.sourceforge.net/
It explains the reasoning behind this registry, and how it won't fall into the same holes that the Windows registry did.
Not if you purge a package instead of removing it.
When you remove a package you remove the binaries, but when you purge it you remove the configuration files too.
How about try reading about it: elektra documentation
The concept of centralizing and standardizing the most common case of configuration files is the same. The implementation of course is different. Each key is stored as a file on disk. There is no daemon. There is no "corruption" (other than corrupting one key which will not affect other keys). The keys are still able to be hand-edited like any text file.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The UNIX permission system can only be seen as a failure from a security point of view,
You're confusing security performance with security features. UNIX has performed very well on security, precisely because it offers few security features.
Microsoft offers many security features, which is the reason why their security is so poor.
and you want to weaken it?
Simplifying permission systems strengthens security.
Brilliant.
Quite right.
A well-designed ACL system is leaps and bounds better than Unix permissions. The problem is mostly that people implement ACLS very, very poorly, scattering permissions all over the filesystem where they are hard to find.
Yes, quite right: the problem with providing ACLs is that most people use them poorly. But people have been using them poorly for decades. Since people aren't changing, we have to conclude that ACLs are a poor mechanism for managing permissions in the real world.
[long-winded description of NT groups]
None of what you describe requires ACLs; in fact, the UNIX group system covers those cases very well. Perhaps you should try to understand them.
What ACLs make possible is ad-hoc, per-file permissions, and those create enormous security and adminstrative problems.
I haven't seen ANYTHING in Unix that will let me both have that kind of granularity and sweeping power.
Yes, and those restrictions are deliberate. They are the reason why UNIX permissions lead to more secure systems in practice than ACL-based systems.
ACLS are both far more elegant and far more powerful.
ACLs may be more elegant and more powerful, but they are not more secure or more usable in real-world scenarios. And what matters, in the end, is security and usability in the real world, not some operating system designer's wet dream.