[MUD-Dev] "From Kansas to Oz"

[Brandon Gillespie]

On Thu, 12 Jun 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:
> In <199706120745.JAA25708 at regoc.srce.hr>, on 06/12/97 
>    at 09:24 AM, silovic at srce.hr (Miroslav Silovic) said:
> 
> >Remember, with MI, you could easily
> >just put core functionality on root, and then spawn multiple world
> >parents from it, each with its own perm checking. I think I know
> >exactly how I would do that in Cold (but its security scheme is
> >different from MOO so it's much easier).
> 
> Quite.  Remove Cold's requirement for a single root and it becomes
> almost trivial at the base level to implement.  Then the ugly stuff is
> in the automatic kick-overs to Oz, the Oz<->Kansas
> inter-relationships, and the Oz generations.

I've debated this over and over, and the main win of a single-root system
is security.  If you can create your own object root at any time, its easy
for joe-programmer to override all security subsystems.  By restricting to
one root object, all it means is design it right, only put security
subsystems on $root them spawn sub roots for each 'world'.

-Brandon Gillespie