launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jeroen Vermeulen <jtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Translations is still being hit by a piece of fallout from the 
person/account split.  It gives us a few oopses a day, now that we know 
where to look for them.  I'm hoping that somebody from the Soyuz or 
Foundations teams might be able to help me understand what's going on.

The error is this one:

EmailAddressAlreadyTaken: The email address '...' is already registered.

It sometimes happens when our import code goes "look up the Person with 
this email address; or if there is none, create one."  The reason is 
that there may already be an Account with the given email address, but 
with no Person attached.  The attempt to create one fails because of the 
already existing objects.

AIUI a "Personless Account" is created for a user who creates an account 
but not on Launchpad.  We can't just create a Person for those cases, 
because the UI would then start claiming that the user was a Launchpad user.

Also AIUI, the Soyuz team made their code recognize situations where a 
matching Person does exist, but is not attached to the Account that owns 
the email address.

So I'm left with several questions:

 * Is the Translations code's approach to the on-demand creation of 
persons wrong somehow?  We clearly want a Person here, not an Account. 
I could imagine having alternate references to "person or account," 
but... yuck.

 * Is there a good way to deal with this without advertising people as 
Launchpad users when they're not?  A boolean for "uses Launchpad" has 
been suggested.

 * How can there be a matched combination of {Person, Account, 
EmailAddress} where the Person is not attached to the EmailAddress?  Is 
it a failure to update the preferred-email field?

 * Does that happen often?  If we detect a case like that and fix it 
up, can we hope for a lot of our oopses to go away?

 * If so, should those cases be prevented and cleaned up for all of LP 
instead of in individual apps that need it?

I'd greatly appreciate any light that anyone could shed on this.  I know 
it's been discussed before, but if nothing else, repeating what we know 
on the list will help us produce a better documentation trail.


References:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/rosetta/+bug/411514
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad-foundations/+bug/408528


Jeroen