Where do we go from here?

I've been rather busy lately working on my visa extension. I'm close, unless the officer comes up with additional paperwork to be submitted, again. But I've no room for complaint when I consider what it takes to get an employment visa in the US.

This Friday I'm leaving for California, and will be there for a bit more than a week. Its MDE Week at Sun Microsystems, and all of MDE from around the globe gets together. I will not be working on CompStrm during the trip. (I probably need some time off, anyway.)

As for access controls, I really think the cart has gotten in front of the horse. Before working any more on access controls, the Ark should be making better use of DescriptorUnits.

It is DescriptorUnits which we have no experience with, though we already have several descriptors: sortls, sortp and the csv=LEnts header. The latter is a good case in point. An LSec which holds LEnts should have a DescriptorUnit which declares this, not a header. And the LEnt-related commands should not be applicable to LSecs which do not hold LEnts.

I've also been thinking about headers. Some topics should allow header updates, and others should not--and that should, again, be declared in the DescriptorUnit. Then the header commands will only be applicable to topics which allow header updates.

One benifit here is that we can reduce the number of applicable commands for most topics, and that should make the Ark a bit less confusing.