[geeklog-devel] Circular group references

[Tony Bibbs]

Here is a unique suggestion related to all this.

Group-level security changes shouldn't happen all that often.  Given that, 
when changes are made to a group we should loop through all groups and 
build their membership in a cache field.  Then you get out of the business 
of expensive recursive calls on each page request.

Did that make sense?  Does it sound feasible?

--Tony

 On Sat, 17 May 2003, 
Vincent Furia wrote:

> Dirk Haun wrote:
> 
> >Here's an interesting case I had:
> >
> >Someone wasn't able to log into his site any more. Geeklog went from
> >index.php to users.php and then seemed to sit there forever.
> >
> >As it turned out, he had set up a circular group reference, i.e. group A
> >was assigned to group B and group B to group A. So when someone who was
> >in one of those groups tried to log in, Geeklog went into an endless loop.
> >
> >The funny thing is that using Vincent's speed improvements in lib-
> >security.php enables you to log into such a site nonetheless. So
> >replacing lib-security.php with the version from CVS is one way to
> >resolve these problems.
> >
> In case anyone is curious, the reason my speed improvement doesn't get 
> caught in this loops is because as it creates the list of membership 
> groups, it checks to see if a group has already been added to the list 
> of groups, and if so, ignores it.
> 
> I don't think there is any reason we necessarily need to restrict 
> circular group assignments, besides geeklog-1.3.7's logon problems 
> (which will be fixed in the next release by my lib-security speed 
> improvements) it really doesn't hurt anything.
> 
> -Vinny
> 
> >
> >However, Geeklog shouldn't let you set up such dependencies in the first
> >place. Avoiding that, though, seems to be an interesting challenge ...
> >Any takers?
> >
> >bye, Dirk
> >
> >
> >  
> >
> 
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-- 
Tony Bibbs          "I guess you have to remember that those who don't
tony at tonybibbs.com  hunt or fish often see those of us who do as      
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                    --Unknown