Distribution tag (was Re: [ticker-dev] A more personal welcome...)

[Phil Cook]

On Monday 17 September 2001 14:24, Julian Boot wrote:
> Bill Segall wrote:
> > 'Distribution'
> >
> > I think that it would be desirable to have a field that acts a hint for
> > distribution across federations. Possible values might include: { local,
> > organization, world, secure, classified } etc. This is badly thought out
> > at the moment but I was hoping that by raising it others might have
> > suggestions ...
>
> this seems like producer specified routing and goes against the content
> based routing of elvin.  if you want to limit distribution, i'd be
> more interested in looking at the interaction of local tickertape messages
> with a adminstratively controlled gateway and the use of keys to enforce
> policy.

I have to agree with Julian on this one.  "Hints" of this form scare me 
somewhat.  For example, the window manager hints in X have turned out to be a 
bit of a disaster: every WM implements different hints, and implements hints 
differently.  Hints shouldn't play a role in the core effect of a 
notification - if there is a real routing problem here, it should be solved 
by Elvin itself (which also lets other protocols exploit it).

A hint like X-No-Archive, however, is fine, as I would not call archiving 
part of the "core" effect of a notification.  This is, perhaps, where X 
stumbled: the original designers probably didn't see WM behaviour as a core 
aspect of X, but today I believe most users would regard this behaviour as 
core.

Phil.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Phil Cook						 "No Neil, after you"
Ph.D. student at large						- Buzz Aldrin
School of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering
The University of Queensland, QLD, 4072, Australia