[tahoe-dev] CLI mkdir inverse?

[Brian Warner]

On Tue, 5 May 2009 06:22:01 -0400
Kevin Reid <kpreid at mac.com> wrote:

> tahoe ls <(head -1 bunch-of-tahoe-caps.txt)

Cool! I didn't know that syntax existed, and that it can appear to the
application as just another filename. Thanks!


On Tue, 5 May 2009 07:45:09 -0600
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:

> Ooh, that's interesting.  What do you think, Brian -- is Kevin's
> idea potentially as useful as the aliases feature?

Well, to be honest, I don't think so. I mean, isn't this what
~/.tahoe/private/aliases is for? It's a world-unreadable file that holds
aliases, there's a well-defined and non-ambiguous method to translate a
(secure,human-memorable,ambiguous) non-secret ARGV string into a specific
(secure,non-memorable,non-ambiguous) secret dircap, and there is a mechanism
('tahoe create-alias ALIAS', or 'tahoe mkdir ; vi ~/.tahoe/private/aliases')
to get a secret string in there without ever exposing it to ARGV.

Pulling secrets out of files with shell syntax is great to have available,
but if you were to use it for any length of time, you'd probably start
looking for a way to automate it and make it easier to use, and I think you'd
end up with something that looks a lot like our existing alias mechanism.

cheers,
 -Brian