[Opensim-dev] Global identifiers

[Melanie]

I think we already have a perfectly good field, which is a UUID for
local users and a URL for remote ones.

Melanie

Serendipity Seraph wrote:
>  On 8/30/10 2:09 PM, diva at metaverseink.com wrote:
>> Hurliman, John wrote:
>>> My interpretation (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that there is
>>> rough consensus on the overall strategy, but an open question of how
>>> to encode global identities when cross-grid communication (or
>>> out-of-grid archiving) happens. 
>>
>> That's what's going on.
>> Up to now, all global identifiers (that already exist) have been
>> volatile; nothing has persisted. As I found myself writing code that
>> would inject global identifiers into a DB table, I thought we should
>> all talk about the form of such identifiers.
>>
>>> There is probably also a hidden question of how to mark a local
>>> account as linked to a foreign identity, which may solve the
>>> friending issue. If I am friends with your avatar and we are both on
>>> grid B but your avatar actually originated from grid A, that link in
>>> the profile is what can tip off the presence service to try a remote
>>> presence check (assuming the user is not online in the local grid).
>>> My only interest in these low level questions like how the global
>>> identifiers and profile links look is what the final decision is so I
>>> can implement it in the OpenSim SimianGrid connectors.
>>
>> Well, we distinguish "user accounts" from "grid users" -- these are 2
>> different interfaces, although implementers may decide to collapse
>> them. But they are different concepts. User accounts are the
>> locally-registered users; in some cases, like for example, the UCI
>> grid, there's only some people who can get accounts there, namely
>> people associated with the university. Grid users are users that are
>> referenced by things that happen in the grid. So we already have an
>> interface for that, although now I'm thinking that perhaps we need to
>> separate its UserID field into 2 things: a local UUID and a reference
>> to the external name. And I guess that's my main issue at this point.
>>
> It seems more reasonable in a distributed system to say that an X is an
> X - a User is a User, whether they originally were instantiated on a
> local or a remote system.   So I would go for collapsing the two as much
> as possible as a matter of policy.  Otherwise freedom to move between
> nodes in the system is more limited and there is more special case logic
> to deal with.    But that is speaking from a general distributed
> computing perspective.  There may be many Opensim details that make that
> seemingly ideal position in practice rather naive.
> 
> - s
> 
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