build-from-branch into the primary archive

[Barry Warsaw]

I think this could be a great feature.  It might also allow us to have a more
fine-grained control over who can upload/push new packages, although I agree
with others that we have to think carefully about how those permissions are
expressed.

On Feb 17, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Steve Langasek wrote:

>  How do we distinguish commits that ought to be built from those that
>  don't?  One way is to say we'll rebuild on things that add a new debian
>  changelog (with a higher version.) Some people commit changes with a
>  series target of 'unreleased' and we could then just actually assemble the
>  package when that flips to be a real series.
>
>Either there needs to be a separate adjunct branch that gets pushed to
>*from* lp:ubuntu/$package to trigger builds, or this needs to only build
>when a new version (previously unknown to the archive) has been tagged on
>the branch.  A lot of time has been spent on socializing the idea that we
>can use the existing lp:ubuntu branches to stage changes, and upload to the
>archive for building only when we're ready; to have some branches diverge
>from this behavior and start building for the archive for each commit, even
>if someone has nominated the branch in question for some sort of whitelist,
>would result in a number of wrongly published packages.
>
>I think the 'bzr mark-uploaded' interface, which sets the appropriate
>version tag, is the natural fit for this.

Observing my recent use, I think there are two things that together indicate
that a particular source branch revision is ready to be uploaded.  First, the
changelog entry's series is correct (i.e. natty, -proposed, etc.), *and* the
version number does not have a ~ in it.

For example, I'm right now working on some computer-janitor fixes.  It's trunk
actually *is* the source branch.  When I merged in pitti's and lool's merge
proposals, I change the version number to `whatever~ppa0` first for local
testing, then for dput upload to my PPA.  Once I'm done with testing, I remove
the ~ppa suffix, do a final commit and push, then `bzr bd -S` and dput the
results to the real archive.

So I think 1) a valid series; and 2) a non-~ version number are enough to
indicate (for me) that the tip is ready to be built and uploaded.

-Barry

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