Re: Salsa as authentication provider for Debian

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Palfrader <weasel@debian.org> writes:

    Peter> On Mon, 13 Apr 2020, Sam Hartman wrote:
    >> >>>>> "Luca" == Luca Filipozzi <lfilipoz@debian.org> writes:
    >> 
    Luca> This is why having a central approach to account creation,
    Luca> rather than distributed, is worth considering. I'm in favour
    Luca> of usernames not changing because one's role changes but that
    Luca> does not mean I'm favour of divergent namespaces.
    >> 
    >> I don't think anyone here is in favor of divergent namespaces.  I
    >> think a lot of us think it would be reasonable if salsa became
    >> the place at which names were reserved

    Peter> Except it's a huge, intensely integrated code-base that
    Peter> currently is very hip.  Just like alioth was a few years ago.
    Peter> Small is beautiful.

I'm sorry, I don't understand your point at all.
Right now, we are quite dependent on salsa.
Checking salsa for whether a name is reserved  and reserving that name
if it is not is an operation that can be abstractly contained.

Yes, that means if we move away from salsa we either need to:

1) provide a new implementation of that conceptual interface.  If nm and
DSA are the only consumers of the interface, the details can entirely
change, but the idea that we'll need to be able to check namespace
availability and reserve a name  will remain

or

2) At that point accept some level of namespace divergence.  There are
lots of ways of doing this, but I doubt we'd pick option two so I'm not
going to focus on it.

Yes, absolutely, salsa is big.
But abstractions are great because they allow us to isolate one part of
a system from another; they can isolate DSA and NM from various aspects
of salsa's bigness.

Yes, various parts of the project are saying that they want to have
usernames stay consistent enough that they are willing to accept the
technical debt of some interface going forward for figuring out if a
name is reserved and reserving that name.
And that today salsa seems like a good place to put the implementation
of that interface.
That's very very very different than getting stuck with salsa's bigness
on an ongoing basis.

--Sam