When Tag1 decided to build Tag1 Quo , we knew there was one question we’d have to answer over, and over, and over again: is there a security update available for this extension? Answering that question - at scale, for many websites, across many extensions, through all the possible versions they might have - is the heart of what Quo does. The problem seems simple enough, but doing it at such scale, for “all” versions, and getting it right, has some deceptive difficulties. Given a site with an extension at a particular version, we need to know where it sits on the continuum of all versions that exist for that extension (we often refer to that as the “version universe,”), and whether any of the newer versions contain security fixes. There are a few different approaches we could’ve taken to this problem. The one we ultimately settled on was a bit more abstracted than what might initially seem necessary. It was also not a “typical” Drupal solution. In this blog series, I’ll cover both the theoretical foundation of the problem, and the approach we took to implementation. What’s a version? Let's start at the beginning. Quo works by having existing... Read more
sam
Thu, 10/20/2016 - 09:55