rmcfatter
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Re: Removal of uploaded material of completed reviews
In the purest sense, there are only two ways to do a review: "pre-merge", which allows for parallel reviews but makes no guarantee that the code ultimately committed is the same as what was reviewed, or "post-merge", where all the reviews and commits are necessarily serialized (only one review and commit at a time). In a post-merge world-- where every commit is absolutely traceable to a review-- it's the version control system, not Collaborator, that's the sensible authority for the source code itself. In that case, there's no real need for Collaborator to hold onto its own copy forever. Even Collaborator calls it a "content cache", not a "repository"; and it's not very efficient at that. It should be able to reach out to the VCS and retrieve whatever version of any file that it needs (if the file's no longer in your version control system, you've got bigger problems.) As you point out, projects get cancelled, reach end-of-life, and so on. What would be very nice is an "archive" function that actually works: You set up search terms matching the reviews you'd like to archive (including searches on custom fields), Collaborator previews the result set, and then generates an archive file (.zip, .tbz., whatever) containing all of the necessary database information, label (table of contents) information, plus all relevant files from the content cache. When you certify that the archive file has been safely copied off to long-term storage, you notify Collaborator of that fact and it then cleans up the database and cache appropriately. To actually be an "archive", it would also need to be able to restore an archive back into the active database like it was never gone. From a programming standpoint that's not a trivial effort, but it's certainly possible.Why does Collaborator 9 always pop up a "Network Error" window on each page load?
Collaborator 9 apparently added a "feature" that some people find annoying. Momentarily, on each page load, Collaborator will pop up a network connectivity warning: The dialog auto-dismisses in less than a second, but it causes undue anxiety among our users, even when on a fast local network. Shouldn't there be a delay before the Web client decides that there are network issues?Re: Shell scripts that should be part of a review are filtered out...
Turns out that's a configurable setting. "*.sh" is one of the default patterns in Admin -> General -> Restricted Files. You can remove that pattern to enable reviews of .sh files. Presumably this restriction is protection against someone uploading a malicious shell script and getting people to execute it instead of just view it; the other files restricted by default are *.bat, *.exe, *.msi, and *.dmg. There are still three problems here: First, that this security measure isn't very useful-- if you've got people uploading malicious files to reviews, or browsers/users who would launch any executable content they display, you've got bigger problems. Second, the client's enforcement of this rule is entirely silent-- the user has no idea that some files were excluded, so critical errors might leak into your product. Finally, the GUI's error message for this case is "Unsupported Media Type", which is misleading ("Restricted" != "Unsupported").Re: End Collaborator's use of Adobe Flash
Just after posting this I checked the news and found that as of Monday night (July 13, 2015), Mozilla disabled Flash by default in its Firefox browser-- not just "old" versions of Flash as before, but all versions-- due to egregious bugs in Flash that were being actively exploited. This means I can't in good conscience use the flash plugin (in any browser) and hope that Collaborator at least limps along without it.End Collaborator's use of Adobe Flash
Collaborator (and all Web-based tools, really) should retire any use of Adobe Flash. The same functionality is now available natively in standards-compliant HTML5 browsers, which are commonplace at this time. Flash Player is a never-ending source of security issues, causes grief for IT administrators, and is constantly pining for updates. If it weren't for Collaborator, I could remove the flash plugin from my system entirely and enjoy improved security.Re: Removal of uploaded material of completed reviews
That was removed in 7.0.7027 according to the release notes for that version: fixed --- Archive Content Cache should go away (Case 61901) (A contender for "most pointless release note" if ever there was one.) I can guess at a few reasons for this decision-- this function was achingly slow and kept the DB locked for a long time; disk space isn't as expensive as it used to be; the cache layout has changed and the archive function was no longer compatible; despite the UI's claims to the contrary there was no good way to restore "archived" content. (Good luck chasing those MD5 filenames through several layers of database pointers.) But these are only guesses.
