Another issue with these attributes is handling permissions on them. You might want your address saved in lily, for instance, so that your friends could find it readily. At the same time, you might not want to have everyone on lily know your exact street address. And you might want your phone number at work available to anyone, but not your phone number at home. I'm thinking we might want to handle permissions by letting a person set a /group to each attribute value, and members in that group can access the attributes. We'd need a few extra special-case values for things like "let everyone see this attribute", but I want any permissions-structure to be a simple as possible.

-- GaranceDrosehn - 05 Dec 2005

It isn't my intention to severely limit the system, but I do think that the server should allow the administrator of that server to set whatever limits they feel are appropriate. Ie, if you want the limit per-user-object to be 1 megabyte on your server, then lilyDB should allow that (well, assuming the moo database itself doesn't die with that much information!). But if I want to limit to be 1 KB per user on my server, then lilyDB should allow me to do that, too.

I also think it's probably best to have a single limit for all of these different things (ie, only one number for the administrator to set), instead of having separate limits for "memo bytes" vs "finger attribute bytes" vs "whatever else". I suppose a case could be made to have separate limits for each purpose, but I'm afraid that could get rather messy.

-- GaranceDrosehn - 06 Aug 2003

Why not allow individual limits with a "hierarchy" approach. The server defines an individual limit for total space taken up in key/value pairs. That limit can be overridden by a key/value pair in an admin dict someplace that indicates that (for whatever reason) that person has more (or less) storage. Without allowing for this kind of flexibility, I think we'd be severely limiting the system.

While I appreciate the concept and reason for the limit, let's not limit the implementation to tie our hands too tightly.

-- ChrisParker - 06 Aug 2003

Something along these lines recently came up in the lily-dev discussion (or perhaps some lily client discussion). That was the idea that the /finger info should be some arbitrary list of keyword/value pairs. /finger would list them all, or you could list a single keyword/value pair.

One thing I'd like to mention with "arbitrary lists". That implies information which needs to be saved on a per-user basis, and thus it should be subject to some kind of limits. I don't want people storing entire warez sites as /finger information. My thinking is that there would be one admin-settable limit for all such information, whether it be memos, info, or this list of arbitrary keyword pairs.

-- GaranceDrosehn - 06 Aug 2003

We have some of this reflected in the /finger and /what discussion_name and /set commands today.

Taking this to an extreme, everything would be represented as an OAV tuple. Memos, for example, could potentially be just an attribute with a URI for a value.

-- ThePrisoner - 05 Aug 2003