1583539 - Provide mechanism for renaming suite/test names

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Tree Management :: Perfherder, task, P3)

Description

[Ionuț Goldan [:igoldan]]

This is an old problem that tends to haunt us from time to time.

Suite/test names for perf tests can get very big, ugly & hard to read.
Renaming them disconnects the data points.

Warning: implementation details bellow! May turn out to be a bad track!
I think we should treat the suite/test names we already have as untouchable. Don't ever try to rename them, even if they have a typo.

Then create the concept of public suite/test names. Renaming them won't disconnect the data points. But it will reflect in all Perfherder's views, improving readability for them by a lot (where needed).

For this to work, I think a new table with a max of 4 fields like initial_suite, initial_test, public_suite_name, public_test_name would do the trick.
initial_suite & initial_test could be indexed & treated as a composite unique key, for faster joins. initial_suite & initial_test are basically foreign keys pointing to our existing suite & test names.

Comment 1

[Dave Hunt [:davehunt] [he/him] ⌚BST]

I like the idea of the test name having an alternative name for presentation purposes.

Comment 2

[Ionuț Goldan [:igoldan]]

Thinking more about this, I don't consider we yet need a new table.
Simply providing new columns to the existing performance_signature table should do the required job.

Comment 3

[Ionuț Goldan [:igoldan]]

We'll also need a web API for doing the actual updates.

Comment 4

[Ionuț Goldan [:igoldan]]

Could we close this bug? It feels like low priority & the implementation done so far wasn't the best approach.

Comment 5

[Dave Hunt [:davehunt] [he/him] ⌚BST]

Agreed, this hasn't really been an issue for us for some time.