Re: Mapping user names

[nick@nsis.cl.nec.co.jp (Gavin Thomas Nicol) writes:]

>One ability I was hoping to give to MADO was the ability for
>user-defined font mappings, which requires some way of finding a
>user's HOME and then reading in a MADO configuration file.

But bitblt probably doesn't have permissions to access their $HOME. There
is no setuid (and this was intentional). Even if it happened to have
their abilities, there's no reason to assume the user wants to store
their own fonts in $HOME, in a filesystem under $HOME, or even on a
fileserver which bitblt could ever find. Imagine keeping the font files
on a pkzipfs, and wanting to load one. You start up a pkzipfs on your
.zip file containing all your personal fonts, mount it into your name
space, and... bitblt can't understand the path.

Would it be possible for the program/library which adds a font to write()
the font information to the bitblt server? I don't remember if bitblt
provides a directory hierarchy when you mount him, but if it did, you could
just create a file in the fonts/ subdir under the server. If you already
see the filename there, you don't have to bother.

This would guarantee that the program which wants to add the font has
the ability to access the font file to be added. I'm not sure there's
a downside, unless there's a fundamental difficulty with bitblt accepting
fonts over connections?

                                                Andy
Received on Sun Jan 9 20:23:40 1994