launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[James Westby <jw+debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2 Feb 2010 11:01:49 +0100, Michael Nelson <michael.nelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been putting together some mockups for the build-from-branch UI
> work (with the help of jml, wgrant and mwhudson), and would love to
> hear ideas on how they could be improved or re-worked etc.
> 
> You can see the details at:
> 
> https://dev.launchpad.net/BuildBranchToArchiveUI

Thanks for working on this Michael, it's great to be able to review it
as a whole at this time, rather than making comments as the changes
arrive.

I have some comments that are quite fundamental, but let me say first
that I like the design for interaction, and I'm confident that whatever
you end up going with will be a pleasure to use.

The main point that underlies all my comemnts is that your focus is on
"building a branch using a recipe," rather than "building a recipe."

I think that it is important to have something on a branch page to get
started, but I'm not sure that driving everything from the point of view
of the branch is the right thing to do. For instance, I might go to the
branch page for the packaging branch, and want to do a build from there,
but for daily builds that won't be the base branch.

If I were to make a suggestion it may be for the following:

  * A branch page has a list of recipes that mention the branch, and
    a link to add a new one.
  * You can navigate to the +recipe page from there, and from there
    there is a "build this" button, which launches the archive picker.

It's extra clicks I think, but it makes recipes more of a first-class
object, rather than trying to make them an implementation detail, which
is what your layout feels like. This isn't just me wanting my work to be
front and center :-). The recipe can be more than just a pointer to the
packaging branch.

I would be anxious for people that don't really care to get something
that works as quickly as possible though.

Some further unstructured comments:

  "When viewing a source package recipe build within their PPA, users
  can:" easily go to the recipe that was used and from there to the
  branches. They should also be able to go to the manifest and so see
  the revisions that were used. I'm keen for these links to be more
  common in Launchpad, from e.g. bugs to the revisions that fix them
  etc. Being able to go binary package->source package->manifest->
  branches will be useful.

  Having the recipe editable from the recipe selector seems a little odd
  to me. Reducing the rounds trips would be good, but it may confuse
  some people who don't realise they are editing a shared object. Given
  that they are series-specific this won't cause too many problems in
  practice though I expect.

  "Should a recipe handle all distro series?!" - If we are going to do
  this then why bother building the source package on each release?
  Build the source once and then rebuild it tweaking the binary package
  version? It may be slightly more work to go from a branch that can
  build a source package for each release and a branch that can build a
  source package that can be built on each release (small difference).
  Would be a great feature to have, but I'm not sure that it's the right
  place to implement it.

  "Slow moving projects, duplicate rejects" either do what Aaron
  suggests, or provide the manifest to the buildd (which I want to do
  anyway), and use the mode where if the recipe resolves to the same
  revisions from the same branches as last time it wont build.

  "Do we currently detect when *none* of the branches associated with a
  recipe add a debian directory?" We could add a better error message to
  bzr-builder so that when they get the build failure email they will
  know what to do.

  "I'm assuming that part of our validation when creating a build should
  be that the evaluated deb-version will be greater than all current
  versions in the target PPA?" I'm not sure we can do that?

  "The destination target needs a progress indicator. For PPAs, the
  detail packages page should show the source package in the
  construction (builddeb) phase, which conceptually is before anything
  it shows right now. How will we do this?" I think adding a line,
  perhaps with a different background, and with (building) or something
  added, but only in the maintainer's view of the PPA.

Thanks,

James