[Opensim-dev] Global identifiers

[diva at metaverseink.com]

I know. But what about when we get to 1.1 and we want to start bridging 
the social network with other non-VW social networks? Their external 
references look different than the ones we are talking about here, and 
we will need a local UUID for those; where do we stick it?

...Should we cross that bridge later?

Melanie wrote:
> 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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