[Color Computer] Re: [Coco] C-Cubed

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 16:27 -0400, jdaggett at gate.net wrote:
> James
> 
> The networking issues will be the more difficult issues. Basically the 
> compiler resides on a license server. To access a license copy of 
> the compiler, the user will either have to login with a account an 
> password or use IP and/or MAC address. IP address works fine for 
> a company as the server sits behind a firewall and the client 
> workstations don't change IP addresses daily. MAC addresses work 
> real fine as that changes only  when the ethernet card changes. 
> 
> In the case of doing this license server over the internet with IP 
> addresses will be a nightmare since most ISPs change IP addresses 
> at least weekly. Some daily. MAC addresses have problems for 
> those that operate behind firewalls. 
> 
> james

If they did want to have a log-in they could use something like webdav.
The authentication is then done by the browser, and not related to the
ephemeral IP address.

But that would only be a problem if they wanted to restrict access. The
license issue is that they only have one license to the software. So
they are attempting to deal with that by sharing one instance of the
software to multiple people. Basically they just queue up preprocessed c
files and feed them into the compiler one at a time and return the
compiled result (and warnings/error messages).

I think it's kind of a weird idea generally (effort is probably better
spent on cc6809 or a gcc port), but I don't see any real problem with it
technically. Commercial projects and open source ones too do this all of
the time via automated builds of source packages, the difference being
the developer builds are normally built on the developers own box with
local tools.

-- John.