NEWS :: magma v.0.0.20070829 released on SVN and download area

Big rewriting of the flare system occurred, since a better and more rational interface was needed.

Previous interface assumed that, to work with magma contents, programmers should face directly flare internals. That's crazy! If a programmer want to code a function that read n bytes from a file, (s)he expect to use something similar to read(filename, offset, size, buffer). She or he will find absurd to have to cast a new flare, read contents from inside flare structure and perform some extra checks.

The solution was to rethink the whole flare system interface. That's how:

• Old magma_flare.h became magma_flare_internals.h, no longer exported via magma.h and no longer needed to work with the flare system.
• A new magma_flare.h was written to offer better interface. New exported functions mimic libc functions behaviour. As you have mknod(), open() and chmod() in libc, you'll find magma_mknod(), magma_open() and magma_chmod() to work with flares.
• As a thumb rule, functions exported by magma_flare.h accept as first and second parameters a uid_t and a gid_t values describing the user that originated the request. These values are used to perform permission checking by underlying flare system. If a function does not expect these parameters, like magma_readdir() does, that's because they are already saved in some data structure passed to the function, like in magma_DIR_t structure.
• Routing issues are totally transparent to users and programmers. If you need access to a flare, just name it. Flare system will find it, will contact owner node, will perform network operations if needed and will finally return you the answer you asked.
• More external symbols where moved inside flare system. That lead to a shortening of magma.c code. To initialize flare system, two calls are now needed:
  1. magma_config_myself() used to transfer command line arguments that describe the vulcano node inside an internal magma_node_t structure called myself.
  2. flare_system_init() used to bootstrap the lava ring (or join an existing one), to create /.dht/ directory to store DHT status, to start the balancer and the garbage collector threads and to perform some other setup operations.
• Some files where merged inside magma_flare_internals.c since having separate source files with one or two functions was meaningless.
• A special case of previous point is dir_ops.c. Externally exposable functions, like magma_opendir() was moved inside magma_flare.h, while internal ones like magma_get_slot() was merged with magma_flare_internals.h.
• A network event loop called magma_network_loop() was also provided. It's the third step in creating a fully featured magma application, after calling magma_config_myself() and flare_system_init().