website/news/plans-for-the-bezoar.mdwn



[[meta title="Plans for The Golden Bezoar"]]
A workday with several Monkeysphere contributors on 2009-01-31
resulted in a significant reorganization of the project in several
areas, primarily driven by the realization that there are two
fundamentally different concepts on the server side:

publishing host keys via the Web-of-Trust (WoT), and
authenticating users via the WoT.

For simplicity and clarity, those two concepts should be independent
from each other, but earlier releases of the Monkeysphere tangled the
two up together more than we probably should have.
So the next release, version 0.23 (a.k.a. The Golden Bezoar) will
have the following significant changes:


user interface: /usr/sbin/monkeysphere-server is no more, and
its functionality will be split out into
/usr/sbin/monkeysphere-host (for functionality dealing with
publishing the ssh host key through the WoT) and
/usr/sbin/monkeysphere-authentication (for functionality dealing
with authenticating users via the
WoT). /usr/bin/monkeysphere-ssh-proxycommand has been folded into
/usr/bin/monkeysphere itself as a new subcommand.


code: the subfunctions are now stored in their own separate
files, and sourced as-needed by the three top-level commands.  The
test suite has also been re-written to reflect the above UI changes.


documentation: in addition to making the man pages reflect the
above UI changes, we're rewriting the "getting started"
documentation to use the conceptually-cleaner distinctions
above.


data storage: /var/lib/monkeysphere itself has been
re-organized with the aim of keeping the host/authentication
distinction clear, simplifying the internal use of gpg, and
facilitating privilege-separated access.


The Golden Bezoar will also feature the ability to painlessly
publish your current ssh host key to the WoT without needing to re-key
the server.  If you're considering adopting the Monkeysphere in the
near future, we recommend waiting for 0.23 to be released, as it
should be conceptually clearer and easier to use.