launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/11/30 Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>>> 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.
>
> I agree that such malice cannot be addressed by the name alone.

Another interesting case is when somebody accidentally registers an
important name, perhaps because they're just experimenting.  This is
already a category of problem that Launchpad handles though, either by
letting the project owner fix the mistake or indirectly by letting
them ask us to fix it (by deleting or renaming the object.)

There is also the case of constructively contentious work within a
single project namespace.  I think normally project owners won't abuse
this feature to squash work they dislike; if they do then the forking
of a new project is imminent.

>> So I could accept either one but I think it's worth having the
>> conversation before we introduce a new namespace.
>>
>
> We're having the conversation now. :)
>
>  * Putting owner in the URL and conflating ownership with write
> permissions leads to broken URLs, which is bad.
>  * Not having the owner in the URL disallows recipes for the same
> package with the same name.
>
> What other considerations are there?

I'd rephrase the second to: "... puts the onus on the user to choose a
good package-wide name."  Perhaps we can think of what would be good
examples and consider how to nudge users to choose them.

One interesting case: "nightly".  Ideally, one nightly would be enough
and we'd actually like to avoid having a hundred users all making
equivalent night OOo builds.  But what happens if the person who
started the nightly gives up, leaving the name derelict?

I think eventually it would be preferable that
.../openoffice.org/nightly does exist and has to go through some
process of reassignment, than that ..../openoffice.org/~dude/nightly
become dead and .../~otherdude/nightly start up.

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