build-from-branch into the primary archive

[James Westby]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:17:50 +1100, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> wrote:
> It seems like 'mark-uploaded' is causing a certain amount of friction
> at the moment: cases where it's not run and the branch therefore gets
> out of sync with the upload, and also just that it's an additional
> step that weighs people down.

Right, because it does not have a visible effect now. If it were to
trigger a build (and given a different name) then I don't think it would
be seen as extra weight.

> From some discussions, it seems like a promising way to trigger
> building would be by the presence of a changelog entry that has an
> incremented version number and that has a real target series.  (As
> mentioned in the LEP point you quote.)
> 
> To me this has the advantage that the decision 'please publish this'
> is visible in the diff etc in what seems like an obvious place for the
> packaging workflow.  It's also something that can be easily be tweaked
> by editing.  It also seems attractively minimal in that something
> targeted at 'unreleased' or without a whole new changelog entry just
> cannot be built, so we can pun that with _should_ not be built.
> 
> bzr mark-uploaded sets a bzr tag which is editable and transparent,
> but probably not quite so much so as file content.
> 
> Are there are problems with doing this?

The only concern I have is that this would be changing the security
model of the archive to some extent. Instead of GPG signed instructions
to publish, we would have somewhat implicit SSH-key signed, or
cookie/oauth signed (in the case of a "Land it!" button on merge
proposals.)

I don't know whether that is a change we want to make. If it isn't then
we either need to use GPG with bzr in some arrangement, or have an
out-of-band GPG signed instruction to build.

Thanks,

James