On 2012-08-23 0:31, Arnav Kalra wrote:
Would it be possible for me to edit someone elses results in the
wiki?
If yes then we need to have a system for authentication. The reason
why smolt came to my mind was because they have a system for
authentication.
When I send my profile using smolt it makes a blank page on the
website which contains the template for results. If I want to edit it
I use smolt on my system to generate a key which I input into that
page. This allows me to edit it and makes sure that only the person
with that installation can edit it.
We can do something similar for testing. For each boot a page can be
created automatically and the person who is testing is allowed to
edit it. To avoid duplicate entries we can allow a person to link all
those authentication keys or pages with his fedora account.
Is this viable?
This is all perfectly true in theory, but to my knowledge has never
turned out to be a problem in practice. I don't think we've ever had a
case where anyone edited anyone else's results on purpose. It has
happened accidentally on occasion, but it's still not a huge problem.
For test days it's just not terribly important: we don't need test day
results pages to be 100% accurate, they really just give us a broad
impression of what's going on, and 99% accuracy is fine for that. Any
actual failures are meant to be backed by bug reports, which can't be
'overwritten'.
For release validation the accuracy of the results tables is much more
important, but for exactly that reason, any errors get caught. Several
of us regularly look at the results page for each release validation
event and double-check any listed failures; there's intensive manual
review of the pages and we do catch any problems. Remember, the wiki has
a big strength in revision control, to offset the weakness in access
control. We can very easily see the history of all changes to the
results pages and catch any errors, and easily revert to earlier states
if necessary.
I'm not actually convinced that implementing access control would gain
us anything at all practical for test days or release validation. Like I
said, in theory it's utterly crazy that anyone at all can come and
change anything at all on these pages. In practice, it turns out not to
be a problem.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net
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