[erlang-patches] What's cooking in erlang/otp (2010-03-22)

[Ulf Wiger]

bile@REDACTED wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:18:29 +0100
> Ulf Wiger <ulf.wiger@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
>> But Erlang also makes socket communication easier, so building a
>> distributed system based on user-level TCP-like channes is pretty
>> straightforward, [...]
> 
> Easier in what way?

I meant easier than in most other languages.

> The core platform isn't extensible. Why can't the
> platform be engineered so that the linking of nodes is abstracted such
> that builtin features are still usable? There is some abstraction in
> net_kernel but it's not advertised AFAICT. As a new user you can open
> appmon, pman or tv and see across nodes... but if you do any serious
> work that all goes away because most places simply can't afford a
> completely open platform. Even allowing arbitrary erlang processes
> access to a port is questionable in my environment. Hence the
> restricted patch. Completely trusted clusters are just not something
> that exists in many environments and it just forces individuals to have
> to recreate the wheel over and over. If I could hook into the message
> passing and linking code standard libraries could be developed to
> provide for cookie like authentication, kerberos, etc. and all the
> native distributed features would still function.

This prompted me to check whether the phrase "kicking in an open
door" is viable in English as well as in Swedish. It seems to be.
No one argues that better security wouldn't be very useful. The
question is how to get there, and exactly what gradual changes
would be the right place to start. To repeat, the bar for changing
the semantics of Distributed Erlang and the rpc libraries is pretty
high, even if it is for a good cause.

BR,
Ulf W
-- 
Ulf Wiger
CTO, Erlang Solutions Ltd, formerly Erlang Training & Consulting Ltd
http://www.erlang-solutions.com
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