launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/12/3 James Westby <jw+debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> On Wed Dec 02 06:53:49 -0500 2009 Jonathan Lange wrote:
>> 3. Branches have the owner in the URL, not doing that here would seem
>> to be inconsistent.
>
> This for me is the convinving argument.
>
> Branches have the owner as part of the name, this was decided early
> on, perhaps with knowledge of issues such as the URLs breaking
> (happens fairly frequently when e.g. your project matures so
>  it's no longer controlled by ~you, but by ~your-project-dev).
>
> As we used this system we learnt more about how it worked and
> what the edge cases are, such as the interaction with bzr where
> it stores the expanded URL as the parent, so even if you update
> the dev focus people still end up at a dead end.
>
> Now we have a very similar situation crop up, where we have the
> same choice to make again, but with slightly differening concerns.
> It may be that this requires a different answer, but I am yet
> to see any argument that convinces me of that. It seems that
> most of the desire to change it is from wanting to avoid the issues
> we have seen with branches.
>
> Therefore I think consistency should win out. As Jono said, if they
> are different then to the user it can look like another weird
> LP inconsistency. Also, taking the less-trodden path is tempting
> because we avoid a pile of known issues, but it does open us up
> to several new ones, and we will know less how to tackle them.

That was a very insightful mail.  I don't really want to agree with
your conclusion, but I don't want to for the reasons you said - that
we know the problems we've seen in the past with branches.  Perhaps
the best argument to do something differently is to see if it is in
fact better, and then we could come back and apply that approach to
branches.

Perhaps there is a middle ground - at the moment you can have
project-scope branches but only for series.  We could have some kind
of concept of a team allowed to create recipes in the project
namespace.

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