what if tracker url changes?

[Frits Jalvingh]

On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 13:53 -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> On 11/18/2010 12:50 PM, Frits Jalvingh wrote:
> We want to be able to identify bugs unambiguously.  We want any person
> who looks at a revision, to be able to see what bug it fixes.  So
> identifiers relative to a specific tracker don't help.
1. You do not help them in case the tracker has changed URLs.
2. Why does a tuple [tracker GUID, bugID] not uniquely identify a bug?

> 
> > especially since the tracker ID is not created by Bazaar at all:
> 
> Neither are email addresses, which we also use as globally-unique
> identifiers.  In both cases, we are delegating the assignment of
> globally-unique identifiers to external sources.
Different discussion, and again- where is GUID-ness of email addresses
needed? To uniquely identify users? You clearly don't- it depends on
what he enters as whoami. Of course you can hope it is unique- and we
can have the same hope for a tracker GUID.

Please remember that I have no problem with "preferring some globally
unique ID" related to the bug- I just want bug ID and tracker GUID
separate, and lookup for tracker url-for-a-specific-action configurable
independent of it.

> > it is
> > created by some local specification, hopefully in accord with some
> > tracker that understands the resulting URL. And the discussion already
> > focuses on the fact that it is not a single unique ID at all
> 
> Bazaar generally does not attempt to provide the guarantee that an
> identifier is the only one that identifies a resource.
That is not the issue. It would be nice if it IS a correct
representation if you're using an URL.

> >- it's key would/should change if the tracker URL changes.
> 
> Similarly, email addresses also change.  Would you change how user-ids
> are handled also?
Is there a clear use case where that is needed? Does an email address
consist of multiple parts, like tracker and bug number?
So- no. There is no problem we /can solve/ around this.

> > If you want to have the ability to have some unique "key" representing
> > this then just represent the bugtracker instance itself with some unique
> > key and separate the bug ID from it.
> 
> We cannot separate the tracker from the bug id.  We don't have a way of
> identifying the bug if we do that.
I don't get that. A compound key is unique too.

> > I really do not see any reason at
> > all to have a bug be identified by an unique key.
> 
> We want there to be no ambiguity about what bug is being referred to.
Well, it would at least be ambiguous when a tracker URL changes. It
would be less ambiguous if that could happen without the internal
representation (guid+bugid) having to change.

Frits