buy-something team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(CC'ing to the new buy-something list, please follow up there.)

On Thursday 17 June 2010 01:25:36 Francis J. Lacoste wrote:
> On June 16, 2010, Rick Spencer wrote:
> > Francis,
> > 
> > Thanks for this info and plan. The simplification of federating on the
> > server side does seem more sound.
> > 
> > On Wed, 2010-06-16 at 16:52 -0400, Francis J. Lacoste wrote:
> > > So next actions from here are:
> > > 
> > > * Michael Nelson and Stuart (or somebody else from ISD) should get
> > > together and kick start a stub project for this.
> > > 
> > > * We should stub-out the API to which the client will talk ASAP.
> > > Ideally, make a local server that responds to the API call with hard
> > > coded value so that Michael and Gary can do integration testing fast,
> > > while we work on making this agent work with Soyuz / Payments for real
> > > on the server side.

I think we're still missing something here.  We need to define the information 
flow and interactions between parts better, it's still very loose and we need 
it to be very precise so that there are no integration surprises (again).

In terms of the Launchpad side, we want to avoid being hit by all the desktops 
(which is part of the motivation to have this separate "agent" component - are 
we going to call it the Software Center Agent BTW?) so I'd like to see the 
agent periodically polling LP to maintain a list of commercial PPAs that 
contain the apps for sale.  That list can then be served statically from the 
agent or Apache.

Launchpad itself will provide some webservice calls:

 * return a list of commercial PPAs, which the agent will call to build its 
list.
 * return a list of existing subscriptions (these are sources.list entries in 
fact)
 * allow the agent (and only the agent) to create subscriptions on behalf of 
the commercial PPA's owner
 * return sources.list entry given a person and a PPA

Launchpad is also doing two new custom upload file types on software packages: 
meta-data and icons, which are pushed through to the repository area 
unmodified.  I'm happy for desktops to hit that directly as long as IS is okay 
too, since it's served from Apache, although the agent could use the 
webservice call to get the list of PPAs and then grab the meta-data itself - 
that's up to the people doing the agent.

The last big question that I discussed with Francis last night was how to 
manage the fact that LP currently requires all subscribers to be a Person in 
Launchpad (which was one of the original design aims for it proscribed by 
Mark).  We talked about using OpenID tokens but this is quite a major change 
to the model and is not an area I know much about, so I'd welcome further 
input on how you guys want to manage this.  Francis, you said that creating a 
Person in Launchpad for all the subscribers is okay for now?

> > Can the stub be ready by June 30th so that the client side can stay on
> > schedule?
> 
> I'll let Stuart, Michael and Julian decide that. My suggestion would be to
> define the interface and then export it using lazr.restful.wsgi. The stub
> could implment all exported methods return fixed value.

The Launchpad part should be done barring any more undiscovered issues.  
There's a couple of fallback plans in case we do have problems:
 * Any code we land to change the webservice is available on Edge the next day
 * We have the dogfood server to test with as a last resort if you're 
desperate.

Finally, the people doing the agent should discuss what interactions with 
other systems they think it needs to do.

Cheers
J