Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Tom Barton <>]

Thanks for getting this started, Shilen.

I imagine two general use cases. In one, copies are made as a 
convenience. A "template" group, stem, or hierarchy is created, and 
copies are made to flesh out some scheme. For this, the copies have new 
identifiers and would optionally inherit memberships held by template 
elements.

The second general case occurs when the names originally chosen for some 
groups or stems need to change while maintaining references to the old 
names, at least for a while. This might occur because names of 
departments, teams, or organizations have changed (merged, split, or 
just renamed). It might also be due to a change in the authority of who 
can create what. For example, initially a group within the Dean's Office 
manages a group hierarchy for their College or Division, and after a 
while they decide to devolve group administration across parts of the 
organization. Depending on how they set things up initially, they might 
need to create new substems and move or copy groups and stems to the new 
ones as part of the hand-off of authority. Another example is a group 
created in a personal namespace that must move to an institutional stem 
to avoid being removed when the individual that created it leaves.

Preserving references to old names is one of the reasons aliases are 
desirable. The alias doesn't change, so it's not as important to 
preserve a reference to an old name. UUIDs serve this purpose, but I 
suppose people don't like to use them because they are opaque. However, 
a flat alias namespace maintained by grouper users can suffer from the 
problems that led us to design stems in the first place: different 
people might create conflicting aliases, or one can create an alias that 
makes the group appear to be other than it is. Most people don't like 
opaque names and tend to read meaning into lucent ones.

Whether or not we create an alias attribute of groups or stems, I wonder 
if it would be worthwhile when moving a group to maintain a list of its 
previous names in a system-maintained attribute of the group. Something 
like the SID history that Active Directory objects have. The way this 
would work is, when moving a group, the new one's name_history has its 
old name added in a manner that allows the group to be selected by 
either its new name or any of its old ones. Clearly, this only makes 
sense for moving and not for copies. In fact, a copy of a group would 
necessarily need to omit the old one's name_history.

Tom

Shilen Patel wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I'm working on creating a design for namespace transition support for 
> Grouper 1.5.0.   I've got some initial information available here.
>
> https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Namespace+Transition 
>
>
>
> I'm very interested to know what your use cases are so we can make sure 
> our requirements cover them.  I'm not working from a pre-defined set of 
> requirements so I imagine they will be updated based on feedback.
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> -- Shilen