price-db storage via BackEnd?

[Linas Vepstas]

On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 01:17:00PM -0700, Dave Peticolas was heard to remark:
> On 21 May 2001 13:31:07 -0500, Rob Browning wrote:
> > linas@linas.org (Linas Vepstas) writes:
> > 
> > > dimwit question: are you sure you want to make your configs global?
> > > It seems it might be nice to have different configs on different
> > > machines ...
> > 
> > some options need to be per
> > machine (i.e. per-user per-machine -- in ~/*), and some need to be
> > per-user per-data file, i.e. stored in the data file per-user.
>
> My second, bigger problem, is that configuration data is user-specific
> and that means machine-specific. User X on machine Y isn't necessarily
> the same person as User X on machine Z. It seems to me that if we start
> adding user configuration to the data file, we have to implement our own
> user-identification system and use that instead of the machine-specific
> one. And maybe for real multi-user setups this is what you have to do.

Even this is not hard.

This should be backend-specific.  The postgres backend can be /
should normally be protected by a username-password login.  So that
capability is there.  The rpc backend -- well, the backend interrface 
for handling logins is in general is underspecified, and so I don't 
know what rpc does.  On my to-do list for backend work is to clarify 
login handling.  Anyway, what I'm saying is that for backends that 
require a login, there is no difficulty in identifying the user.

(also: I could store per-user config info in the postgres backen as
one big, opaque, long string.  No problem.  There is no reason that
I see to educate postgres about the meaing of the contents of the 
string.)  Again, the biggest issue is 'what's the user-login api 
for the backend?'

-- 
Linas Vepstas -- linas@gnumatic.com -- http://www.gnumatic.com/