Show relative times in our HTML-view

[skx]

Show relative times in our HTML-view

[skx]

So I started working on this again. The specific problem is that we throw away the timezone when we parse the date/time from the YAML report.

I first of all looked at different parsing-libraries, such as this one:

• https://github.com/araddon/dateparse

Then I realized that we can simplify this problem enormously:

• If we receive a HTTP-upload we know that puppet "just ran".
• So don't bother parsing the time: field.
• Instead we regard the time that puppet ran as the insert-time.

So our insertion code changes from:

stmt, err := tx.Prepare("INSERT INTO reports(fqdn,state,yaml_file,executed_at,runtime, failed, changed, total, skipped) values(?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?)")

To this:

stmt, err := tx.Prepare("INSERT INTO reports(fqdn,state,yaml_file,executed_at,runtime, failed, changed, total, skipped) values(?,?,?,'NOW()',?,?,?,?,?)")

That will let us calculate relative times in the DB-layer, I think?

[skx]

To recap. There are two possible solutions here:

• Get better at parsing the submission-time, from the YAML upload.
• Avoid the problem entirely and record the time the report was received.
  • This is close to the time that puppet ran, but obviously not 100% identical.
  • Since the time the report is received is local to the puppet-usummary server we can calculate the difference to now when we handle serving the HTML/JSON/XML reports and it'll all "just work".

I'm leaning toward to the second solution due to simplicity but it will require a DB-change, which means that either we need to explain to users how to make that change, or we must insist the local database is wiped and recreated, orphaning any existing reports.

Due to this breaking-change I don't want to do anything hasty, on that basis I'm going to make the next release before coming back to this issue.

[skx]

Plan:

• Stop populating / using the AtUnix field.
• Reports will be written to $prefix/$hostname/$hash
  • Where $hash is the hash of the report-contents.
  • This will still allow us to identify duplicate-submissions.
• Add a new field to the database, as a migration, which will be the submission time.
  • If this is present use it. (i.e. New submissions.)
  • If not fall back to the the At field.