[GMG-Devel] Federation, table setup, and permissions

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Heya all,

So Jessica Tallon is about to start some work on federation stuff, and
there's some overlap with other things, especially the permission stuff
that Natalie (tilly-q) is working on and the authentication stuff
rodney757 is working on.

Some questions:

 - How to handle remote representations of things (especially in the
   database)?
   - What things need to be remote?
     - Users
     - MediaEntries
     - Collections?
     - Comments?
   - What will it be like to represent remote things?
   - What about database constraints?

     Things like slugs don't apply if it's a remote media entry
     so doing "user + slug" on media entries doesn't make sense

   - Behavior

     Media entries that are remote and media entries locally don't
     really behave the same probably.  Ones that are remote "do a lot
     less"... we probably have captured their thumbnail, but we might
     not know a lot more about them.

   - Options for modeling things
     
     - Different tables: MediaEntry/User vs MediaEntryRemote/UserRemote
       
       Gets around the fact that restrictions are different depending
       on whether something is local or not
       
       Adds new restrictions though.

     - We could have a single table for things like MediaEntry and
       User but have a boolean for "local" (or "remote")
       
       This would be easier to query.  It would mean a messier model
       though.  It would also mean that some of our constraints might
       not be so easy anymore.
       
   - I'm assuming that the single table thing is the right solution.

   - How does StatusNet implement this?

 - Permissions
   - Currently tilly-q is working on permissions; they are pretty
     simple at present, just groups and with users in groups.
     
https://gitorious.org/~npigeon/mediagoblin/npigeons-mediagoblin/blobs/OPW-Moderation-Update/mediagoblin/db/models.py#line562
   - What about remote users though?  How does this tie into
     permissions?  Does it tie in at all?

It would be great if we could have a meeting about this all soonish.
I wonder if sometime over the next few days is particularly good?

 - Chris