Eugene,
Yes, managing all these identities is a big pain! At IBM we have
multiple such things too and tomorrow a bunch of my passwords expire,
which happens every three months. So it's time to start changing
passwords again. And of course different systems have different
password rules, so it's hard to get one password that works for all
the systems. And that means you have to write them down, which kind
of defeats their security, and undermines the very reason for making
them expire so often and for defining rules to restrict your choice of
password. It's such a joy to be told that a password no one would
ever guess is nevertheless trivial by some undocumented algorithm.
Are you aware of the Higgins Trust Framework project?
http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/
I don't know much about it, but I think it's trying to address exactly
this type of problem and I suppose it could be used by other projects
at some point in the future.
Eugene Kuleshov wrote:
Hi,
I am not sure how to address this issue and looking for advice.
In development process we usually have several identities for each
developer and each identity is managed in its own system, such as
version control systems (CVS, SVN, etc), issue tracking systems
(Bugzilla, JIRA, etc), instant messaging systems (icq, xmpp, gtalk,
yahoo, skype, etc) and regular email. In IDEs each of those those
identities is managed by its own plugin. For example in Eclipse, CVS
and SVN identities are known by team version control providers, issue
tracking systems are managed by Mylar or specialized plugins, and
instant messaging identities are managed by ECF.
As a result, we don't really have links between those identities.
For example, we can't open an entry in the CVS History, Synchronize
view or CVS annotation (aka "blame" thing) in the editor and send an
instant message to the user who committed that change (say when he
did something outstanding or if he did something terrifying) or see
if person who made comment to the bug report is online.
We need some kind of address book or roster UI and correspond
backend that would allow to manage multiple user identities and would
allow 3rd party components to interact with those identities. The
closest piece Eclipse have right now is the Roster view from ECF, but
it still quite far from supporting such feature and it is unclear if
it even in scope of the ECF project.
IBM Jazz project choose different approach to this issue. since they
built their own issue tracker, version control system and even
instant messaging system they got unified identity across all those
systems. Unfortunately in the real world we have to deal with number
of existing legacy systems.
Does anyone have thoughts on this and what is the best way to
address this need?
regards,
Eugene
PS: you can also comment to my blog post at
http://jroller.com/page/eu?entry=multiple_identies