Re: Inclusion Lists for Hypercardus Clonus

[Michael McClary <michael>]

> From ravi Wed Feb 14 11:08:38 1990
> 
>    Date: Wed, 14 Feb 90 10:41:32 PST
>    From: tribble (Eric Dean Tribble)
> 
>    I wonder how hard it would be to implement a conformance check for
>    each of our Waldo types?  Ravi?  MarkM?  I suspect a brute-force one
>    might be easy.
> 
> Not that hard, but it would still be some amount of work. Since
> everyone will have our waldo types already, it's probably not
> worthwhile -- anything that conforms will probably have been built
> with that waldo in the first place.
> 	--ravi

Yep.  The problem doesn't arise for the backend for any of the initial
Xanadu-supplied waldos, or any data entered through any backend-waldo
of the appropriate type, because it had to conform to be entered.

It MAY arise if we, in some future release, integrate a third-party
waldo (say, "WordAStra") into the backend.  At that point, we may want
to make it automagically endorse with "Xanadu WordAStra" any "WordAStra"
data it retrieves that conforms.  (Since the backend would be endorsing
the data as conforming to our idea of the spec, it wouldn't rubberstamp
the endorsements from (potentially-broken) frontends, but would check
for itself.)

It may also arise if we decide to check the data that arrives over BEBE.
We should do that starting with the first release where backend-users
will be running BEBE with a competitor's machine, to prevent a hacked
backend feeding them "poisoned" data.

	michael