Considering moving all Launchpad branches to 2a - based formats

[John Arbash Meinel]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 09/13/2011 04:58 PM, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm investigating the possibility of doing a mass upgrade of all
> Launchpad branches into up-to-date formats.  Thereafter, we would
> either forbid old formats to be uploaded, or automatically upgrade them.

I'm personally in favor of auto-upgrading all branches. With the small
caveat of actually looking at the repositories that are in old formats
and checking if those projects are currently active (which you've
mentioned you're looking to do).

> 
> Why are we considering this?
> ----------------------------
> The way Launchpad currently handles branch formats is broken.  We
> permit stacked branches to have different formats from the branches
> they are stack on, which makes them unusable (Bug 828409).  There are
> other ways of addressing these issues, like converting all stacked
> branches into formats compatible with their stacked-on branches, but
> these would be more complicated.

Right. If the 'master' branch is upgraded, then all the stacked branches
would be inaccessible (until you 'bzr upgrade' them as well.)

> 
> Who would this break?
> ---------------------
> Bazaar versions prior to 1.16.1, from June 2009.  There is no
> supported desktop version of Ubuntu with a version that old, however
> Hardy Server is still supported, and it shipped with 1.3.1.  RHEL 4
> and 5 may also be affected.

One small bit. bzr-1.6 was the first one to introduce stacking. So
branches/repositories created with a bzr older than 1.6 cannot be
stacked. Thus Hardy Server cannot be creating stacked branches which
could then get broken by upgrading the stacked-on location.

I don't think we have an SRU for bzr-2.0 into Hardy, but I do believe we
have packages for it. Our ppa currently has: 2.3.4-0~bazaar1~hardy1.

I'm pretty sure we have equivalent packages for RHEL. So if we say "You
must use 2a format on Launchpad", I'm pretty sure people that use
Launchpad could have access to an upgraded version of bzr.

> 
> What are the next steps?
> ------------------------
> Examine Launchpad's current inventory of branches, determine whether
> there are major active branches on Launchpad in stale formats, and if
> so, why.
> 
> Aaron

Right. As much as possible, if we can get feedback from people about old
versions of bzr, that can drive how we use it on Launchpad.

John
=:->
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAk5vciMACgkQJdeBCYSNAANa0gCgrDnsPrR82tpcfNYdIqGMKj2H
+Q0AnjOtoQy3/amZvWKHNbWj7UxFGbyL
=/SLV
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----