On 8/30/10 2:09 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Hurliman, John wrote: >> My interpretation (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that there is >> rough consensus on the overall strategy, but an open question of how >> to encode global identities when cross-grid communication (or >> out-of-grid archiving) happens. > > That's what's going on. > Up to now, all global identifiers (that already exist) have been > volatile; nothing has persisted. As I found myself writing code that > would inject global identifiers into a DB table, I thought we should > all talk about the form of such identifiers. > >> There is probably also a hidden question of how to mark a local >> account as linked to a foreign identity, which may solve the >> friending issue. If I am friends with your avatar and we are both on >> grid B but your avatar actually originated from grid A, that link in >> the profile is what can tip off the presence service to try a remote >> presence check (assuming the user is not online in the local grid). >> My only interest in these low level questions like how the global >> identifiers and profile links look is what the final decision is so I >> can implement it in the OpenSim SimianGrid connectors. > > Well, we distinguish "user accounts" from "grid users" -- these are 2 > different interfaces, although implementers may decide to collapse > them. But they are different concepts. User accounts are the > locally-registered users; in some cases, like for example, the UCI > grid, there's only some people who can get accounts there, namely > people associated with the university. Grid users are users that are > referenced by things that happen in the grid. So we already have an > interface for that, although now I'm thinking that perhaps we need to > separate its UserID field into 2 things: a local UUID and a reference > to the external name. And I guess that's my main issue at this point. > It seems more reasonable in a distributed system to say that an X is an X - a User is a User, whether they originally were instantiated on a local or a remote system. So I would go for collapsing the two as much as possible as a matter of policy. Otherwise freedom to move between nodes in the system is more limited and there is more special case logic to deal with. But that is speaking from a general distributed computing perspective. There may be many Opensim details that make that seemingly ideal position in practice rather naive.
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