checkbox-dev team mailing list archive

[Zygmunt Krynicki <zygmunt.krynicki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a rather short CEP, let's get to it. This proposal handles job
names *only*. White-lists are another topic that I will describe separately
(it will be a larger transition and i18n will be only a one aspect of it).

Best regards
ZK

Rationale
=========

Current efforts to make plainbox, checkbox and various job providers
translatable are affected by the fact that we abuse JobDefinition.name as both
english-like constant identifier and user-visible name. I would like to
decouple those roles.

Proposal
========

1. I would like to propose that the on-disk format field ``name`` be deprecated
   and not used anymore.
2. If the field ``name`` is used, it will be transparently mapped to ``id`` and
   used to define the new job attribute ``JobDefinition.id``. All uses of
   ``name`` will cause warnings to be logged. After a while we can remove that
   feature and rejects the ``name`` field (for another period, after which we
   could reuse it).
3. A new field ``summary`` is defined and mandatory for all jobs. The summary
   field must be one line, short (capped to some reasonable amount) and should
   be derived from the current name field in a meaningful way (manually, one
   time transition process).
4. The ``summary`` field will be translatable
5. PlainBox will resort to ``JobDefinition.summary`` instead of ``.id``
   whenever the job needs to be displayed or converted to a string.

Impact
======

This proposal would need to see forked job definitions *or* add support for
``summary`` in the old checkbox. The level of required support is minimal, only
to the point where current functionality does not regress