Michael, I think your work on Rainbow is very important, but I think it is a bit opaque. Perhaps you could improve your documentation and as well write a tutorial about it that would make it more apparent how much is actually implemented and what an activity can do with it. So here's an example. In the Rainbow page on w.l.o you refer to <a href="http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=security;a=blob;f=rainbow.txt;hb=HEAD">http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=security;a=blob;f=rainbow.txt;hb=HEAD</a> for more information. Yet this file has several locutions of the form "This can be implemented" and "I believe but have not confirmed" which leave the reader unclear as to which services have actually been implemented. Hopping over to Low-Level Activity API the information about security doesn't correlate with the permissions referred to in the txt file. Also you leave ambiguities for the reader by using the passive voice throughout these articles. Changing from passive to active voice answers many questions for the reader. Here is an example: "All writing to the file system is restricted to subdirectories of the path given in the SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT environment variable." Well, we know that isn't true in all cases, because activities get installed by Sugar outside that subtree. So possibly you mean "Rainbow prevents any activity launched by the Sugar shell from writing to any directories except those under SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT". Or do you? Any exceptions? What about reading files elsewhere in the file system? The scattershot documentation within several wiki pages and text files of unknown currency is also a problem. How about a unified document befitting such an important aspect of the Sugar architecture. I think demystifying Rainbow within a comprehensive document containing a section specifically aimed at the concerns of activity developers would go a long way toward expanding its use. Carol Lerche <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Michael Stone <<a href="mailto:michael@laptop.org">michael@laptop.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 01:47:01AM -0500, Mikus Grinbergs wrote: >[Also, I'm hearing whispers of 'no Rainbow' after Joyride.] Mikus, In my view, it's up to the SugarLabs folks to use Rainbow or to drop it. I have tried to clear the way for them to use it on all the platforms they care about by simplifying it, by making it more generically useful, by writing some basic .deb and .rpm packaging in order to ease testing, and by writing Sugar patches which cause Sugar to use it. Unfortunately, in the two months since I announced this work: <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010528.html" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010528.html</a> and since I spoke about it at Fudcon Boston in January, I have received no feedback more serious than a (kind) thank-you note from Walter, let alone testing, bug reports, or patches. As you might imagine, this overwhelming response leaves me more than a little bit discouraged. Now, it could certainly be the case that there's more work that I need to do in the form of documenting, testing, or pushing my recent rainbows before people will be excited about trying them out and, if that's the case, someone should tell me. Since no one has done so to date, despite repeated overtures, I've mostly come to believe that no one cares. Do you know differently? Michael P.S. - I find this state of affairs particularly sad, since I think there's an /increasing/ amount of awesomeness that Rainbow can provide, e.g., bringing all the recent hard work the kernel folks have been putting in on network containerization and memory-resource cgroups "to the masses". _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list <a href="mailto:Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org">Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel</a> </blockquote></div> -- "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair