[Pipet Devel] Resend of earlier message

[Brad Chapman]

This is just a resend of some rambling that I did earlier. Thought it 
might be relevant to the $LOCI_HOME stuff. I know some of the stuff I 
thought then is wrong (sorry!) but hopefully it might make some sense 
:)


Hey all. I just had a random thought on the private versus public 
program
loci issue (sorry that it is so late into the design of the directory
structure). What I was thinking is that maybe public versus private 
isn't
specific enough for setting loci/program availability.
        For a bioinformatics example, you might have a database of
information that hasn't been published, but that you would like to 
share
with your collaborators. Or similary, you might have a program you are
developing that isn't bug free, but you would like some of your 
friends who
use Loci to help try out for you. Then you wouldn't want it to be 
publicly
accessable, for fear that some evil crackers would try to crash your 
system
using an undiscovered bug, but would like to let it be used by a 
restricted
number of people.
        Okay, so I thought up a way to try and make this possible:

1. When a program is being ported to Loci, it will need to have some 
kind
of Loci specific file describing it, like the meta-data files of 
Applab or
the *.acd (I think--don't really know much about EMBOSS, sorry if I'm
wrong!) files for EMBOSS. This file will likely be in XML like 
everything
else and have info about the program including the widgets it wants,
command line options, etc. Well, why not have an additional line that
specifies something like:

<availability>public</availability>

In this way the loci users could set a locus to have specific 
availability,
such as a group of collaborators on a project, ie.

<availability>top_secret_HIV_project</availability>

2. When a remote user connects to another computer, they will need to
authenticate themselves (through CORBA authentication stuff, I assume) 
with
a
name and password (if they are not registering as a public guest).

3. Then when a remote user asks the Loci program for a list of 
available
programs/databases/etc. they will be passed all available loci. So if I
logged in as guest, I would only see the publically available loci, 
while
if I logged in under a user name and was put into the
top_secret_HIV_project group, I would see publically available loci 
and the
top_secret_HIV_project specific loci.

So what does everyone think? Stupid idea? Good idea?
Have-you-been-up-for-six-days-straight-doing-nothing-but-smoking-crack 
idea?


Brad