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• CI tests to enforce specific development rules - good practice?

  - by KeithS

  The following is all purely hypothetical and any particular portion of it may or may not accurately describe real persons or situations, whether living, dead or just pretending. Let's say I'm a senior dev or architect in charge of a dev team working on a project. This project includes a security library for user authentication/authorization of the application under development. The library must be available for developers to edit; however, I wish to "trust but verify" that coders are not doing things that could compromise the security of the finished system, and because this isn't my only responsibility I want it to be done in an automated way. As one example, let's say I have an interface that represents a user which has been authenticated by the system's security library. The interface exposes basic user info and a list of things the user is authorized to do (so that the client app doesn't have to keep asking the server "can I do this?"), all in an immutable fashion of course. There is only one implementation of this interface in production code, and for the purposes of this post we can say that all appropriate measures have been taken to ensure that this implementation can only be used by the one part of our code that needs to be able to create concretions of the interface. The coders have been instructed that this interface and its implementation are sacrosanct and any changes must go through me. However, those are just words; the security library's source is open for editing by necessity. Any of my devs could decide that this secured, private, hash-checked implementation needs to be public so that they could do X, or alternately they could create their own implementation of this public interface in a different library, exposing the hashing algorithm that provides the secure checksum, in order to do Y. I may not be made aware of these changes so that I can beat the developer over the head for it. An attacker could then find these little nuggets in an unobfuscated library of the compiled product, and exploit it to provide fake users and/or falsely-elevated administrative permissions, bypassing the entire security system. This possibility keeps me awake for a couple of nights, and then I create an automated test that reflectively checks the codebase for types deriving from the interface, and fails if it finds any that are not exactly what and where I expect them to be. I compile this test into a project under a separate folder of the VCS that only I have rights to commit to, have CI compile it as an external library of the main project, and set it up to run as part of the CI test suite for user commits. Now, I have an automated test under my complete control that will tell me (and everyone else) if the number of implementations increases without my involvement, or an implementation that I did know about has anything new added or has its modifiers or those of its members changed. I can then investigate further, and regain the opportunity to beat developers over the head as necessary. Is this considered "reasonable" to want to do in situations like this? Am I going to be seen in a negative light for going behind my devs' backs to ensure they aren't doing something they shouldn't?

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• while(true) and loop-breaking - anti-pattern?

  - by KeithS

  Consider the following code: public void doSomething(int input) { while(true) { TransformInSomeWay(input); if(ProcessingComplete(input)) break; DoSomethingElseTo(input); } } Assume that this process involves a finite but input-dependent number of steps; the loop is designed to terminate on its own as a result of the algorithm, and is not designed to run indefinitely (until cancelled by an outside event). Because the test to see if the loop should end is in the middle of a logical set of steps, the while loop itself currently doesn't check anything meaningful; the check is instead performed at the "proper" place within the conceptual algorithm. I was told that this is bad code, because it is more bug-prone due to the ending condition not being checked by the loop structure. It's more difficult to figure out how you'd exit the loop, and could invite bugs as the breaking condition might be bypassed or omitted accidentally given future changes. Now, the code could be structured as follows: public void doSomething(int input) { TransformInSomeWay(input); while(!ProcessingComplete(input)) { DoSomethingElseTo(input); TransformInSomeWay(input); } } However, this duplicates a call to a method in code, violating DRY; if TransformInSomeWay were later replaced with some other method, both calls would have to be found and changed (and the fact that there are two may be less obvious in a more complex piece of code). You could also write it like: public void doSomething(int input) { var complete = false; while(!complete) { TransformInSomeWay(input); complete = ProcessingComplete(input); if(!complete) { DoSomethingElseTo(input); } } } ... but you now have a variable whose only purpose is to shift the condition-checking to the loop structure, and also has to be checked multiple times to provide the same behavior as the original logic. For my part, I say that given the algorithm this code implements in the real world, the original code is the most readable. If you were going through it yourself, this is the way you'd think about it, and so it would be intuitive to people familiar with the algorithm. So, which is "better"? is it better to give the responsibility of condition checking to the while loop by structuring the logic around the loop? Or is it better to structure the logic in a "natural" way as indicated by requirements or a conceptual description of the algorithm, even though that may mean bypassing the loop's built-in capabilities?

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• Program Installer Not Detecting Internet

  - by KeithS

  Hello I am trying to install a program through the Ubuntu Software Center. Every time I click install I get a Message stating "failed to download package files, check your Internet connection". I have tried different software installs and get the same message. I do have an Internet connection (hence being able to write this), I have restarted the computer and have reset the Internet (twice) but still get the same message. Any Ideas??

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