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Re: fs-independent quotas
On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 01:28:18PM -0400, James K. Lowden wrote:
> > - We still need suggstions for better terminology than "quota classes"
> > and "quota types".
>
> Our last words on that subject were on 20 October:
right...
> > > Two pairs that strike me as more mnemonic:
> > >
> > > id, target
> > > principal, securable
> >
> > There's already an id column in the table. The "class" is the type of
> > id, not the id itself. And similarly, the "type" is the type of
> > target, not the target itself.
> >
> > Maybe "idtype" and "targettype"?
>
> If I understand the problem correctly, some of the naming difficulty
> arises from a normalization error. Thinking in relational terms,
> id_type is a property of id, and target_type a property of the target.
> Those are both independent of the id-target pair, so you really have
> three relations, not one, i.e.:
>
> id, type
> target, type
> id, target
>
> I don't know if it's feasible or desirable to separate them that way,
> but it would make naming them easier.
No - if the IDs were oids this would be true (e.g. "oid 123456 is a
user") but they aren't. If the id is 6, the id type field is there to
tell you whether it's uid 6 or gid 6. That can't be normalized out;
you might well have quota info for both uid 6 and gid 6.
The same is true for the target; the limit value is "300" and the
target type says whether this is supposed to be 300 blocks or 300
files or 300 wombats. It's not a property of the value "300".
the pair (id, idtype) is really the whole key. It's not that the type of
the ID is metadata about the ID number
> Restricting the discussion to the names in the existing structure, if
> "idtype" classifies the existing id column, then that's a good name.
> I'd use "id_type", sacrificing brevity for clarity, unless there are
> other names with unseparated words.
I'm starting to think that "idtype" is in fact best for this. And I
think it should be one word, at least in identifiers (perhaps not in
text, where it should be "quota ID type") because that way symbols
like QUOTA_IDTYPE_USER, which is most of the usages that are going to
appear, are delimited neatly.
> That's the easy one. The other one means "kind of thing to which the
> quota applies". I can't think of an English word that means
> "limited thing", but we really want such a word so that the name can be
> "limited_thing_type".
>
> target_type is defensible; that gives us "type of thing thing the quota
> is aimed at". But it's still a bit generic, and it's hard to reason a
> priori about the "target" of a quota: is a quota aimed at the account
> or the storage?
>
> Unless someone suggests a good word for "limited thing", maybe the best
> option is to invent a term of art and *define* it to mean what you
> want, after the manner of Humpty Dumpty. To that end I suggest
> "quotar" or "quoton". They're both short, easy to remember, and mean
> nothing obvious. The latter kinda sorta sounds like "quota on", which
> might be helpful.
Or "quotee" or "quotand"; the problem is that none of these are
particularly clear.
Maybe it should be "restype" for resource type.
--
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost
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