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+## 2024-10-14
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+
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+### Letting Puter Desktop Control Client FS Cache
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+
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+#### Move Context to `putility`
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+
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+The Filesystem module for puter.js will need to check `puter.env` to determine
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+whether it's delegating client FS calls to Puter's API or Puter's Desktop via
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+postMessage. `env` was already being passed to the Filesystem module via its
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+constructor but the constructor had no reference to it; having only looked at
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+the constructor itself and not where its initialized, I didn't realize this
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+and started working on another way to pass it.
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+
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+I decided to add Context which will allow us to incrementally migrate all the
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+modules to a situation where the things available to modules generally is one
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+piece of information in the code, and doesn't need to be repeated for each
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+constructor call manually.
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+
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+### What happens when apps make FS calls to Puter's desktop?
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+
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+I'm going to describe a problem that I overlooked before I started working on
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+this. If `env` is `"app"`, then we delegate filesystem calls to Puter's desktop
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+so that caching is centralized and all apps can benefit from the cache. Okay,
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+that's great, but... **Puter Desktop has user privileges, not app privileges.**
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+
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+With this, I see a couple of options:
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+- Puter desktop makes the call to check ACL
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+ - we don't expose this yet
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+ we need to ensure it doesn't expose the existence of files for which the
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+ actor does not have "see" permission.
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+- Apps maintain their own cache
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+
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+In either case, apps need to be able to subscribe to filesystem events for
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+cache invalidation. This means the file/location relevant to the event needs
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+an ACL check either way. It seems there is no choice but to allow Puter Desktop
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+to expose ACL.
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+
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+I thought about adding this to `/stat` - i.e. Desktop can pass an app ID and
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+get information about what kind of access the app has - but that would incur
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+additional database calls for no reason, especially if Desktop really does
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+have that entry cached already.
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+
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+This will require a new endpoint then: `/auth/check-app-acl`. I'll put it in
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+PermissionAPIService for now. It seems a little out of place there but it
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+also doesn't seem to make sense to create a new service for it.
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+This method may eventually be deprecated if we find out apps need to be
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+able to perform ACL checks on behalf of delegate apps, in which case we might
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+create a more general-purpose `/auth/check-acl` endpoint that can cover
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+both cases.
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KernelDeimos