launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 20 April 2010 23:32, Jeroen Vermeulen <jtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2010-04-20 18:05, Jonathan Lange wrote:
>
> Jono, thanks for showing us more of the breadth of this problem beyond my
> own very limited research.
>
>>> People not familiar with distributed version control fail to
>>> figure out how to start a branch.  Project owners set up translations
>>> exports to nonexistent branches.
>>
>> I am familiar with DVCS and I think I'd be tripped up by this one. Why
>> doesn't the translations exporter create a new branch?
>
> Because there are choices to be made that we probably don't fully understand
> ourselves.  Does the user have the right branch sitting around somewhere
> that we don't know about?  What if they push it just as we try to create it?
>  What if they want to use the branch for merging with their development
> branch?  What if that's not the one selected in Launchpad for whatever
> reason (e.g. because that's a mirror of a bzr branch hosted elsewhere)?  Do
> they have any restrictions on versions and formats, e.g. because they are
> running stable OSs for a long time?
>
> We did ask the bzr folks and were assured that creating an empty branch
> would not be the right thing to do.  The suggestion was not to offer
> unpushed branches for selection, but on reflection I think that would just
> be moving the hamster around under the carpet.  Why your branch doesn't show
> up in the selector would be highly nonobvious.
>
> I now see this also came up in the discussion for bug 368312, which you
> pointed to.

To me, the translation exporter is creating a branch that can be
looked at and or merged, in much the same way that a third-party
contributor can do.  It shouldn't be creating new empty branches and
it shouldn't be writing in to branches owned by someone else.  It
should make its own branch and then invite people to look at it or
merge from it.  This seems to avoid many questions about users pushing
to it etc.

The question does come up of which branch it should start from but
presumably it should start from the series branch for whatever you're
translating.

If you want to talk about this more I'm sure anyone from Bazaar would
be happy to help.

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