Documenting Wikitcms

A few folks had asked me to document all the various things I did to the wiki during the Fedora 21 cycle, related to the release validation test result pages - the system for creating them from templates, and the interaction with python-wikitcms and relval.

I already added template documentation for most of the template pages that are relevant, but that just kind of gives you an idea of what each template does specifically; it doesn't give you an overview of how the whole system works.

As I've been working on this stuff for the last few months, I've settled on a perhaps slightly wacky interpretation of it which nevertheless makes the most sense to me. I like to consider that what we have effectively done, over time, is implement (part of) a test management system as a set of conventions about wiki content.

So I decided to document the system in just this way: the Wikitcms page on the wiki documents the Wikitcms 'test management system'. It explains all (well, most) of the conventions about page naming and contents and categorization and so on that python-wikitcms expects when reading existing results, and that are honored by the templates and python-wikitcms/relval when creating new result pages and entering results.

In time-honored F/OSS tradition, this concept introduces some fun naming confusion with the python module. You'll note I've taken to calling it python-wikitcms in this post; from now on, as far as practical, the Python module is python-wikitcms, the wiki-based 'test management system' is Wikitcms (with a big W). But I'm not going to bend over backwards to rename git repos and things, that's just unnecessarily awkward.