Re: Pipeline Parameters by Default

As a fail fast advocate, I prefer strongly the position that keep
NOTHING be passed by default

As a user, when I would call for an external pipeline, I would just
include it, then run it

Then there would be some errors telling me that some required
parameters by an XSLT stylesheet are not available

Then I will decide to ALLOW them all or to select some to make them available

As a more bigger timeframe, it will enforce pipeline providers to make
sure they use only the parameters they want and no more to prevent
unexpected side effects

I prefer to burden to be shared between users and pipeline providers


At the opposite, your proposal says

" Let's do the magic, but the fall for the user would be bigger when
he/she will take hours to find nasty side effects"

I don't think it's the paradigm I vote for

Mohamed

On 6/7/07, Alex Milowski <alex@milowski.org> wrote:
>
> We had a discussion today and a straw poll about parameters to the
> pipeline and whether or not they are passed to steps by default.  I think
> this is expected behavior in the case where a user takes an XSLT
> transformation and then places it in a simple pipeline with some
> set of pre-steps like XInclude.
>
> I reject the argument against this because of security concern as:
>
>   * parameters are no different than pipeline inputs or outputs in
>      terms of security.  That is, if you are concerned about pipeline
>      invocation from a security perspective, all inputs--xml or parameters--are
>     equally troubling.
>
>   * the pipeline author now has the control to exclude pipeline
>     parameters from a step.  This means a pipeline author can write
>     a "secure step" than can't be affected by pipeline parameters
>
>  * true security relies upon securing the execution environment from
>    doing harm to the local system (e.g. as a "jail" or "secure VM").  As such,
>    parameters, inputs, and outputs have little to do with this.
>
> --
> --Alex Milowski
> "The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
> inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
> considered."
>
> Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics
>
>


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Received on Friday, 8 June 2007 09:26:14 UTC