I am going to have to answer your questions in multiple emails. Here's the first of them.
1) Can you recommend a good overview concepts & facilities document that we can all read to
bring us up to speed on the system-level aspects of Augment? It would be great if we can all
get to a common basic level of understanding. I know that I always feel a little foolish asking
basic questions that I could have answered myself by doing a little reading ahead of time.
Not sure about this. Let me look into what is available that might be useful.
2) That said, could you briefly explain the concept of an ident name in Augment and how it is
used?
Every Augment user is assigned one or more idents. An ident is a combination of a short (2-4 character) unique identifier for the individual and a short identifier for their organization. Additionally, there is the concept of a role ident when multiple users might assume a role within the organization - e.g. administrator or help desk. Idents are also used to support mailing lists and group memberships. Each statement within an Augment file is tagged with the ident of the last person to create or modify that statement. Idents are used to restrict access to Augment files to selected individuals or individuals who are members of an ident group. They may also be used to identify the recipients and senders of emails. The ident system is also used to store general purpose contact information about Augment users.
3) Is this list of tasks something on the order of an afternoon's work, or several days work to
accomplish, once Ken clones the BI5 host?
This will be a several day project.
6) On the 8th item, you're saying that the host name is complied in to Augment as well as
stored in various configuration files? Is this a logical host name that is internal to Augment,
or the actual host name of the virtual TOPS-20 system running Augment?
The actual host name - e.g. BI5
8) On the 9th item, do you mean that the mail relay host is compiled in to the SMTP deamon
code, rather than being read from a configuration file?
Currently, it is. This was a quick and dirty fix to deal with a version of SMTP that does not have code to use the DNS to resolve host addresses. The SMTP code uses host table look up, but that is no longer feasible in today's internet environment. So, a patch was added to send all inter-host email to another, co-operating host (www.bootstrap.org) for forwarding to their final destination.
9) On the 12th item, what has been the practice in Augment with regard to access privileges
to source code? Some systems make source code readable by everyone but modifiable by
a more limited list, while in others it is only available to a select list. It a matter of culture,
so I'm interested in the practice within the NLS/Augment culture. As an artifact, I'd think
that we'd want the permissions to reflect that.
During the time period thatI have been involved with Augment, the source code has been made readable only to a select list of users.