Re: Some docs help

On Sep 12, 2005, at 2:44 AM, Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:

>> I'm afraid I'm still confused. I would have *thought* the way to   
>> represent all of this was to have the following fields in the   
>> liveuser_users table:
>> pk: a primary key
>> authuserid: userid in foreign auth system
>> authsystemid: fk reference (possibly implicit) to which auth  
>> system  the above authuserid field refers
>> perm_user_id: fk referring to which liveuser_perm user this   
>> authorization applies
>> Then in liveuser_perm_user, we have a primary key and perm_type  
>> and  stuff that applies to a given user, rather than how they  
>> were  authorized.
>>
>
> No. Auth is separate of everything else. Auth needs no modification  
> for LiveUser at all. Remember we could be authenticating against  
> some old legacy database. This is the basic assumption. The  
> authentication database may not be modifyable. Even if people use  
> the LiveUser auth container we cannot change this assumption of  
> course.
>
> So all the LiveUser specific stuff is in the perm container. So  
> what we do is we map every auth user from each auth container to a  
> single perm_user_id. This perm_user_id is the true unique  
> identifier for a user within LiveUser.

Sorry; still confused. I understand the separation you refer to, but  
I don't understand how we can have a *single* (on the perm table)  
auth_container value, rather than one for each auth a user might want  
to use (the user table).

It doesn't matter if we're just authenticating against a single  
container, but then you wouldn't need two tables. The only reason for  
separating this into two tables is so you can have multiple  
containers for a single canonical user. But if I have multiple  
containers, which one of them does auth_container refer to?