ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[John McAleely <john.mcaleely@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 6 July 2015 at 23:38, Steve Langasek <steve.langasek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>
>
> > I believe they can only be at '1' in a channel once.
>
> When an alias channel is repointed from one target to another, the sequence
> numbers will change.  But the number is unique with respect to the "real"
> channel, so as long as the information displayed is the real channel - and
> not an alias - then this suffices for identification.
>
> Also, we've mostly eliminated the use of aliases at this point.
>

It's perhaps worth noting that when we were using aliases, displaying the
alias somewhere in the UI (not the real channel) was important, because it
was the name used in instructions we were publishing to users and OEMs.

My take away is that the system has the capability (via alias channels) to
publish channels were the build numbers do make arbitrary jumps backward or
forward, and we currently succeed in not using that capability (mostly).


> Yes.  There are two ways you can uniquely identify an image: "channel,
> sequence #, device", or "ubuntu_part, device_part, custom_part".
>
> The first is preferable, because using the second does *not* tell you for
> certain which channel you're on (since images are copied from one channel
> to
> another!), whereas if you have the first you can always look up the
> identifiers for the individual parts (ubuntu, device, custom).
>


Whilst I agree that channel,sequence,device conveys more information
(notably what came before, and what will come next), I think there are
communities for which the ubuntu_part,device_part,custom_part is more
directly useful. I'd be keen to see a display that showed both sets, and
indicated that they were different views on similar information. For
example, if you are mostly developing customisations on an otherwise stable
image, direct reporting of the custom_part id is useful.

Of course, a convenient lookup (better than json) near system-image.u.c
might be as good.

J