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

[Joar Wandborg]

On 07/01/2013 05:25 PM, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
> 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.

I'm leaning towards separate tables. I can't really say why, which makes 
my opinion merely more useful than useless. I need to figure out things.

- Hopefully SQLAlchemy can help us out with a 'helper' table that really 
is two separate tables.
- Separation of the tables gives us some semantical separation since 
remote and local users will have different rights/action endpoints. I 
need Jessica to confirm if there is any truth to this.
- The respective helper could then be named differently from the 
local/remote tables so that you can easily tell whether you need to 
logically handle federation or not.

>     - 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
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