launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/11/27 James Westby <jw+debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> On Thu Nov 26 19:49:43 -0500 2009 Martin Pool wrote:
>> Adding the owner would be a bit consistent with bzr branches, to which
>> these have some resemblence.  However, I think putting the owner into
>> the branch name has been a bit mixed, because there are important
>> cases where people want to change the access rightly without changing
>> the name.  Therefore on the whole I'd argue for leaving it out, and
>> having an owner field that can be changed later.
>
> The only issue with leaving it out is that the name must then be
> unique across all recipes for that package/distro, correct?
>
> I see two problems with this, firstly that if someone calls theirs
> say "official" or "poolie" then you have an issue with impersonation.
> Yes, you can check the owner by going to the page, but even those
> looking at the page might not notice. Granted, there tends to be
> a proliferation of branches named "trunk" or similar, so it is hard
> to know which is the blessed trunk from the unique name anyway.

They can of course already register ~bzr-team and push
~bzr-team/bzr/3.0 if they're actually trying to be malicious.  I don't
think the name can ever be enough.

> The second issue is that I expect people will tend to informally
> namespace things by putting their nick in to the recipe name anyway.
> This isn't necesarrily an issue, but in other areas LP tends to want
> to capture this information structurally where it can.

I agree with these, but I'm not sure the second is a problem.  I think
people do tend to distinguish branches that ought to have global names
(even if they happen to be owned by someone) from those they think of
as personal.  So they can make mbp-doc.   Launchpad will know from the
owner field and other things who's been involved with it.

So I could accept either one but I think it's worth having the
conversation before we introduce a new namespace.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>