Distributed development toolset (Re: ArchiveReorganisation and sponsoring)

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Sep 01, 2008 at 01:49:04AM -0400, Michael Casadevall wrote:
> 5. Pray that it gets merged before someone commits a change that
> conflicts (in my general experience, Launchpad merger and bazaar's
> merge algorithm leaves something to be desired)
> 6. Get someone to STILL sponsor the upload unless we make it that a
> committal equal upload (there are cases where someone can merge but
> not upload).

Oh, I missed this bit. One result of arranging for there to be a
standard branch location for each package (of course people could create
branches elsewhere, but the standard location would always correspond to
or be destined for the archive) is that commit privileges to that branch
will be made identical to upload permissions. That is, if you can upload
the man-db package, then you can commit to lp:ubuntu/man-db.

That eradicates this problem, particularly in concert with introducing a
more sophisticated permissions model than just
ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-dev, which is what ArchiveReorganisation is
about.

> 7. If your modification is a new upstream, and you need to get it
> merged by someone else, I find its a general PITA, since then you have
> to hunt down the orig tarball and drop it in the right place.

This seems amenable to tool development, especially since the same
problem applies to VCS-based and non-VCS-based uploads.

However, we'll also be producing automatic -upstream branch imports, and
in time we may be able to generate .orig.tar.gz files from those
branches using pristine-tar. There's still some thought to be applied
here.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]