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Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 15:35:16 -0400
Subject: Re: Short Term Plan: Add Security Management Capabilities to
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> ... Actually how about turning that a bit inside out and ...

Any good DBA would tell you that neither is in fourth normal form, with the
correct form being more like the following:

    <tomcatpasswd>
      <user name="duncan" password="32kalkf902"/>
      <user name="craigmcc" password="23asdfjask2"/>
      <user name="costin" password="659asdfk39"/>

      <role name="pmc"/>
      <role name="committer"/>

      <auth user="duncan" role="pmc"/>
      <auth user="craigmcc" role="pmc"/>
      <auth user="duncan" role="committer"/>
      <auth user="cragmcc" role="committer"/>
      <auth user="costin" role="committer"/>
    </tomcatpasswd>

Note: while I'm saying this with a little tounge in cheek, there is a bit of a
point to the exercise.  Take a look at the three representations and figure out
how much work (using whatever units of measure you like) would be required to
delete user duncan.  One could make a similar observation about the amount of
effort required to remove a role, but intuitively this is a less frequent
operation.  For this reason, given the choice between the first two
alternatives, I would prefer the former (users containing roles).