[wp-hackers] GSoC 2013: UUID Abstraction

[Aniket Pant]

Hey,

I posted this sometime back, but it was a weekend. Eric responded on my
blog code.aniketpant.com

Would be great if I can get more insights on my idea.

Thank you.
On Apr 27, 2013 2:54 AM, "Aniket Pant" <me at aniketpant.com> wrote:

> Hey everyone,
>
> I'm Aniket (http://www.aniketpant.com), a third year undergraduate
> pursuing Mechanical Engineering at BITS Pilani - Goa Campus. I started
> web development with Codeigniter and after sometime picked up
> WordPress for developing small applications, themes and plugins. I
> have also spoken at two WordCamps in India, once on theme development
> and the other time on using metaboxes effectively.
>
> I planned to apply for GSoC 2012, but WordPress wasn't selected as a
> mentoring organization and I ended up getting busy during the summer
> with an internship. This year, while going through the ideas list, I
> was happy to see some of the old ideas back. In the last two weeks, I
> have opened some tickets and wrote a patch. Just trying to get the
> hang of the way WordPress development functions.
>
> I was planning to work towards Import/Export operations but my current
> understanding of the JSON based output is not sound. Somehow, I missed
> out on the UUID Abstraction Project while going through the list
> earlier and saw it sometime back. Just wanted to share my understand
> of the project and get some feedback on it.
>
> ## The basic idea
>
> This project is interesting because it is one of those projects which
> can actually go into the release cycle if the work is done right and
> the end result doesn't hamper any of the existing code. On reading
> through the data available on UUIDs, a number of variants are
> available. I feel that v5 which uses a SHA-1 hash is a suitable choice
> even from the security point of view. A v5 UUID is generated by
> providing a namespace and a name. Given the same name and the
> namespace, the generated output will be the same.
>
> ## How UUIDs can be generated?
>
> I searched around the net and found this -
> https://gist.github.com/dahnielson/508447. The mentioned file contains
> functions for generating v3, v4, v5 UUIDs.
>
> ## What namespace can be used?
>
> The namespace can be any of the following -
> - A unique string provided by the user during install/setup
> - The website name (but this can be similar in case of two websites,
> not sure if it will affect anything in any case)
> - A fixed/common UUID for all installations (not sure if this is a
> really good idea)
> - A random UUID created via a v4 UUID generator
>
> This can be converted to a UUID as the namespace needs to be another UUID.
>
> ## Change in the user table
>
> A new column for UUID will be introduced where the username will be
> used as the name for generating the UUID. Since the username is a
> mandatory field, it will always be present.
>
> namespace + username = User UUID
>
> ## Change in the posts table
>
> This table already contains a GUID which is in the form of a URL. It
> is unique, but for consistency it is logical to implement a UUID in
> this scenario. Similarly over here, the name provided for generating
> the UUID can be provided as the post title.
>
> Removal of GUID will not make sense because it is used all over the
> software for generating the URL in many places. Instead the field can
> be modified and updated to use UUID in it's place.
>
> ## How the changes will be carried out?
>
> A tool can be introduced to do this. It will run all user and post
> entries through it and generate UUIDs for them.
>
> This is what I have been able to think so far. I would really love to
> get some insights for my approach and what I might be planning
> incorrectly.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Aniket
>