[rfc] shut down bazaar-commits list?

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Martin Pool wrote:
> We have the bazaar-commits list
> <https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/bazaar-commits> to which
> some developers have their machines configured to send email every
> time they commit, thereby letting other people be aware of work that's
> not yet ready for mail.  I have occasionally got mail from Robert
> correcting bugs in code I have not yet pushed which is kind of cool
> though a bit creepy. :-)
> 
> Anyhow, this list, like all mailing lists, accumulates a bit of spam
> that needs to be manually filtered, so I was wondering if we can do
> away with it and just have people subscribe to branches on Launchpad
> instead.
> 
> I suspect the answer will be "no" because other people use the list
> more than I do, but I thought I'd ask anyhow.  At any rate it may be
> interesting to work out what would make this better on Launchpad.

Being able to subscribe to all branches that are created for a given
project would probably be the big thing. I create a *lot* of branches,
and I think it would be a lot of overhead to subscribe to each one if
anyone actually wanted to track what I'm doing.

But even further than that, I don't push up everything I do the second I
commit it. Even if bzr was perfectly fast, the 8s ssh connection
overhead would be enough that commit would be quite a bit slower.

My general habit is to work in a local shared repository, and push just
before I get ready to send. (or just after). Alternatively, I might push
if I'm about to switch to another branch (since I only keep a couple
working trees around).

Anyway, there would be a considerable delay from the time I commit
something new, and the time it would be announced via a Launchpad email.
I don't know how much that matters to people, but I thought I would
mention that.

> 
> I think the drawbacks to doing it that way would be:
> 
>  * not all branches are pushed, or at least there may be some delay
> before they're pushed
>  * you can't (?) yet get a so-called structural subscription to all
> bzr branches?
> 
> It does have advantages:
>  * you can directly pull or browse the branch
>  * it doesn't take any client configuration beyond pushing the branch
>  * the data is available by rss as well as mail
> 

I think not being able to subscribe to a branch that doesn't exist yet
is sort of a blocker for me. Also, consider that new plugins I generate
will automatically be emailed based on my config...

I suppose if Launchpad had some sort of "aggregate" feeds. So that
people could subscribe to the ~jameinel feed, or the ~jameinel+bazaar
feed. (For Bazaar related plugins/projects/etc.) Certainly I would
subscribe to a ~bzr feed, but that would miss ~lifeless, etc. Unless you
could subscribe to something like ~bzr/*/* + ~*/bzr/* + ~*/bzr-*/*

That would get you most of the bzr branches, and bzr-related branches.

Oh, and what would it do for things like 'bzr-svn' whose primary trunk
is actually located elsewhere (though I guess Jelmer also has a
- -mirrored branch).

John
=:->
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