[Freeciv-Dev] Re: client/server authentication (PR#1767)

["Mike Kaufman" <kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 11:36:39AM -0700, Raimar Falke wrote:
> > 
> > As chris mentioned, I would be willing to go for a --password option, which
> > if it is used, will skip the password input step and send that password to
> > the server. 
> 
> Command line options are bad since they can be viewed by the other
> users of the system. ps shows this.

hmm, I don't like this. That password is going to have to sit in the
client's data segment somewhere since we don't want to have it disappear
from the rc file if we save our settings (we'll have to save that too).

If you think that's ok for the client, we can do this, but for now, the
user is going to have to add it manually to the rc file.
 
> > > This may be an indication that the userdb/ directory isn't needed.
> > 
> > no. This needs to be an separate library, and building two different
> > libraries in one directory doesn't seem great design to me.
> 
> > > As a side note: I think we should seperate between the user_db
> > > interface (user.h and user_db.h) and the implementation
> > > (user_db.c). So user_db.c should be renamed so that it contains a
> > > "file", "reg" or "simple".
> > 
> > why? This seems to me one of the more pointless renames. You need a better
> > rationale that this. 
> 
> A have the idea that in the default installation there would be a
> server/libfile_userdb.a. If now someone want to build another userdb
> for mysql this would end up in server/libmysql_userdb.a. At configure
> time it is decided what library should be built. For freeciv it
> doesn't matter if the mysql code files are in server/, server/userdb/
> or server/userdb/mysql/.

Hell no Raimar. see above. one directory, one library. Since the plan is to
make this library pluggable, it makes even more sense for this not to be in
the server directory (and compiled by default, see my other post). Any
you're never going to want two different database libraries at once, so
there's no reason to have them named different things. And no, we're not
ever going to be including multiple db frontends in cvs, so the the naming
scheme is pointless. Let's think a little about bloat here. Let's think
about how many people might use a real database for their freeciv
implementation. One (us)? Two? Even if it is two or half a dozen, what
makes you think that we'll want to force them to all use (for example)
mysql? No. This is a non-starter. The point to having a very simple
database (via registry) is to make it easy for someone to post their
server on metaserver for a pickup game, etc without the issue of getting a
real database. Frankly, I'm not sure why we're bothering with lockfiles in
this particular case. The chances of getting locking issues using the
registry lookup method, on a machine other than pubserver which is running
_more_ than one server in pretty fricking miniscule.

> You plan to import lockfile.c?

only if I find one that's GPLed. Otherwise I'll write my own. Although I
don't know crap about fnctl...

-mike