New Bazaar Branches on Launchpad don't work

Russel Winder russel.winder at concertant.com
Fri May 22 22:05:22 BST 2009


Jonathan,

Thanks for your detailed reply, it is much appreciated that issues, even
when somewhat over-expressed, are taken seriously.

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 18:59 +0200, Jonathan Lange wrote:
[ . . . ]
> I am truly sorry that Launchpad has caused you so much grief. I
> personally want Launchpad's codehosting to be a near-perfect invisible
> service that just lets you get on with doing whatever awesome things
> you are doing in your branch.

Thanks for this.  I think what is important is for me not to just
grumble but to be constructive about moving things forward.  Hopefully
this email fulfils . . . 

I guess the really crucial issue here is that Launchpad supports series
of branches for a project, yet whenever a new branch is uploaded it
seems to be assumed that the branch must be stacked on trunk.

I think the highest priority has to be to allow the series to be
specified so that stacking happens on the right branch.

[ . . . ]

> We don't let stacked-on branches be deleted, because deleting such a
> branch breaks every branch that is stacked on it. This is acceptable
> in only the rarest of circumstances. If you ask a question at
> https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad, you'll be able to get someone
> with admin privileges to sort out the situation.

In the end I deleted all the stacked over branches then the stacked on
branch, reinstalled a new trunk and then reinstalled the branches.  One
of them is fine as it is a branch of trunk. However the other is a
branch of the 1.6.x series mainline and so should be stacked on it and
not on trunk -- which is what it got stacked on.

This was doable for me in this case as my master branches are on my
machine with the Launchpad branches being mirrors.  In reality the
Subversion repository is the mainline but Bazaar branches are stored
there that are effectively mirrors of my masters.

> More generally, we should never recommend a cscvs import as a
> stacked-on branch, and Launchpad could probably grow a configuration
> option for a branch to say that it should not be recommended for
> stacking.

I am not sure about this.  The difficulty here is that the import is not
entirely equivalent to a bzr-svn branch and so is fundamentally
problematic.  I don't know all the issues so I am speaking from a
position of real ignorance, but from this position I would suggest that
the Launchpad auto-import from a Subversion repository should be using
the same technology as a user would use, i.e. bzr-svn. 
-- 
Russel.
============================================================
Dr Russel Winder                 Partner

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