I arrived in Dublin yesterday after attending a couple of congresses in Mexico.. (which basically means: no more conferences, no more sunny days and no more great food, at least for a while.. ;-) sigh!

The first congress I attended was the Debian Conference. We proposed a round table to discuss the possibility of an OpenSolaris Debian based distribution. I have to say that it was really interesting, both the round table and the corridor talks on this topic. To make a long story short: there are many Debian developers and Solaris users willing to turn something like that into reality, but there are a couple of legal problems which prevent the OpenSolaris license (CDDL) from complying with the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines). So, at this moment, if we really want a Debian based OpenSolaris distribution, it seems that we have two options: either we change the choice of venue clause of CDDL, or we go ahead with the idea of dual licensing it under GPLv3.

By the way, I have uploaded my pictures of DebConf 6:

A few days ago, I was interviewed for the Euskadi Digital station on the Cherokee project.

It is great to see how more are more people are interested in the project, big sites switching to Cherokee, the project community growing, and as in this case, non IT people learning about the project from the mass media.

The interview is available on-line, you can either download the MP3 file (6,5 Mb) or listen it right now:

.. ah, by the way, it is in Spanish.

Sometime ago I wrote a blog entry about the ACL support in GNOME. I have been working on that for sometime, and currently the ACL support is working alright, so I think we ought to think about including all that stuff into GNOME 2.16.

The two modules affected by all these changes were: gnome-vfs and nautilus. In the case of gnome-vfs, Christian created a branch to work on this some time ago. We wrote down the base classes and two back-ends supporting both, POSIX 1003.1e for Linux, and Solaris system calls. The Nautilus interface is working as well, and in a previous post I uploaded a screen-shot. I have fixed a few minor issues since I captured that image, but it basically remains the same.

The original idea was to put all the VFS changes back into GNOME 2.14, but I wasn't completely sure about it and we ended up delaying it for GNOME 2.16. Now that 2.16 is approaching we should think of merging all the changes into HEAD.

However, there is something important that we didn't take into consideration: We are only supporting the most basic ACLs scheme. I think the base classes in gnome-vfs are flexible enough to handle more complex and modern ACL systems, and we should write down the back-ends before making that interface stable.

There are some file systems that support ACL in a much more flexible way to what Linux or Solaris do by default. In the case of the Linux file systems like ext3 or reiserfs, and the Solaris UFS, they support only the basic stuff that you could expect of a ACL system. In most of the cases it is fair enough, so at first look, it shouldn't be a big issue for anyone if we go ahead only with the two current back-ends.

However, there are ACL systems much more powerful than those ones. For example, the Windows NTFS ACL system (which is currently supported by Samba) is much more flexible. We have also ZFS (Zettabyte Filesystem) included in OpenSolaris, which implements the ACL scheme described in the RFC 3530.

If you take a look at the RFC or to some of this blogs:

• Lisa Week's Weblog: NFSv4 and ZFS ACLs post
• Mark Shellenbaum's Weblog: ZFS ACLs

you're gonna realize of the huge difference between the current ACL schemes and this new approach. Just as a quick introduction: instead of three permissions (read, write and execution) there are about seventeen, it is possible to set negative ACL entries, and the inheritance support is more flexible.

Currently Solaris ZFS implements many of the features of the new ACL scheme, but as far as I know, the rest of the file systems don't support anything even similar to it; although I guess/hope other free operating systems like Linux or the BSDs will support it soon

I have done some work some to support the RFC3530 ACL scheme in gnome-vfs. It isn't finished though, so I'm going to keep working on this and committing the changes into the acl branch of the gnome-vfs module. The idea is to implement it all before GNOME 2.16 is released in order to ensure that the access control list related API supports all these new features.

The next step will be to redesign the Nautilus related stuff. Currently, there is a patch available that hasn't gone upstream yet. Some days ago, I talked with Alex Larsson about this during the last OSDL Desktop Architects Meeting in Mainz, so I hope he is going to review it soon :-).

The idea is to check the capabilities of the file system in which we are working. If it support all the advanced features of ZFS or NFS4, Nautilus should allow the user to see and manipulate all its properties, otherwise it should show something close to what the current patch shows: a quite simple ACL management dialog from which you can add, remove and modify ACL entries, and "default ACL entries" in the case of the directories.

So, summarizing: The ACL support for GNOME is ready and working. However, we're working to support the new ACL features included in the most advanced file systems like ZFS.

Quick post:

• Tomorrow morning I'll heading to annual Debian developers meeting: Debconf (held in Oaxtepec, Mexico).
  

• My pictures of the "OSDL - Desktop Architects Meeting 2" are now online.
  

On Sunday, I will be heading to Mainz, Germany for attending the "OSDL - Desktop Architects Meeting 2".

As far as I know, the first one was a very successful meeting, so I expect it to be at least as interesting as the first edition. It will also be exciting because I'll be catching up with some people with which I haven't met in long time. :-)