[MUD-Dev] "From Kansas to Oz"

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <Pine.BSF.3.96.970619152929.2710A-100000 at roguetrader.com>, on
06/19/97 
   at 08:40 PM, Brandon Gillespie <brandon at roguetrader.com> said:

>On Thu, 12 Jun 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

>> 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'.

Kansas/Oz'es approach (understandable given MOO's single inheritance)
was to heavily layer the security on the creation of new roots, and
the ability of an object to access another object dependant from a
different root (Oz generations).  Their assumption (largely correct)
was that given controls on those two points the rest could pretty well
be assumed.  

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
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