Wednesday 13 November 2013

Re: Giving developers access to requeue package imports [Was: Ubuntu Platform developers BOF session?]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 03:33:59PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2013, at 11:32 AM, Steve Langasek wrote:
>
> >But I think it would be more interesting to get a permanent fix for this
> >bug:
> >
> > https://bugs.launchpad.net/udd/+bug/714622
> >
> >This accounts for the problem people have mentioned, that core packages are
> >much more likely to have failed imports. The importer badly needs fixed to
> >not throw up its hands when the revision ID of a tag has changed; it should
> >only care about this when the branch contents are wrong.
> >
> >This single bug accounts for just under half of all importer failures, and
> >is a failure scenario that the importer *could*, with sufficient smarts,
> >resolve automatically.
>
> This may be controversial, but (except for trying to fix error conditions), I
> think we should disallow all developer pushes to UDD branches and only let the
> importer write to them. It's simply too error prone otherwise, and there's no
> good reason for it.
>
> One possible reason for developers to push to UDD branches is to share the
> code with other people, or to avoid the lag in importer runs. Of course the
> former can be easily handled by pushing to a personal branch. The latter? Oh
> well, I can live with that for error-free branches. ;)
>
> A long time ago I decided never to push UDD branches and always let the
> importer update them. I've never regretted that or encountered problems with
> that discipline.
>
> Cheers,
> -Barry

Hmm, so if we can't planned changes to UDD branches and have to use a
separate user-owned branch for that, then what's the use of the UDD
branch?

It sounds to me like it'd then be much easier for me to just maintain my
own branch on the side and upload from there, ignoring UDD entirely,
which surely isn't what we want there.

--
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com