launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 15 February 2012 21:39, Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> There are three things we can do with Mercurial imports:
>
>  * Rip them out completely
>  * Hide them behind a feature flag
>  * Mark them as beta
>
> I'd prefer either hiding them behind a feature flag or marking them as beta.
> This would make it possible to easily re-enable them later when bzr-hg is
> improved. The amount of hg-specific code in launchpad is fairly limited (a
> couple hundred lines of code, most in tests).
>
> Thoughts?

We should do one of these.

I would rather not rip them out completely.  (I think generally if you
have code that's not fully baked, but it's hidden from the user, it's
ok to leave it in place until the moment it gets in the way of someone
trying to do something else, or it gets so old it's clearly never
getting finished.)

I don't mind much whether they're marked beta or removed entirely.
(It may be that one patch could fairly add feature flags allowing us
to either beta-flag them or disable them, but perhaps that's
overcomplicating things.)

If there are at least some that are working ok, perhaps marking them
beta would be enough.

If they're marked beta, perhaps we can say so when you look at the
branch page for an import, as well as the point you create one.
Basically the places they might be looking at when they go to file a
bug, ought to tell them they're in alpha.  If they're removed
entirely, I suppose there ought to be some way for people to _know_
that they're gone, rather than spending their time searching around,
and perhaps that's a reason to have them visibly deprecated rather
than just gone.  Perhaps they should be badged 'alpha' not 'beta'.

Whichever it is, there ought to be a blog post about it, which the ui
can link to.  Dan can help.  Perhaps that post should give a channel
to constructively express the desire things be improved, eg by
upvoting existing bugs.

Overall, I prefer the idea of marking both hg and cvs imports beta.

-- 
Martin