New Launchpad feature: Diff between Sid and Oneiric

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 07:46:41AM -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Thursday, June 16, 2011 01:25:05 AM Steve Kowalik wrote:
> > On 16/06/11 16:11, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > > This new page still offers substantially less functionality than
> > > MoM/grab-merge.  If you want to mark merges as in progress or leave
> > > merge related notes for other developers, MoM is the place to do that.

This raises an interesting point that for better or worse, there are now
two places for packagers to leave merge related notes.

Especially once the 'sync-me' button is available in Launchpad, it would
stand to reason that a growing number of people will be using that.
They'll notice the comment field there and start utilizing it.
Meanwhile, other packagers will be continuing to use the MoM and could
miss those comments.

It looks like MoM handles comments via a cgi script addcomment.py that
you pass the packagename and comment.  Presumably it stores this data
someplace and then when generating the merge pages includes those
comments.  Not sure whether it keeps track of who provided the comment.
Looks like it tracks bug #'s in some fashion as well.

The merge comment functionality in Launchpad is exposed in the
launchpadlib API.  There is a getDifferencesTo() routine which looks
like it will give you the list of differences, represented as
distro_series_difference objects.  The dsd objects have a couple status
fields, a parent_package_diff_status field (which I think seb128 was
asking about for showing diffs in the gnome versions page), and an
addComment() routine (presumably requires being logged into LP).

  https://launchpad.net/+apidoc/devel.html#distro_series_difference

Comment objects track the author, date of comment, and text:

  https://launchpad.net/+apidoc/devel.html#distro_series_difference_comment

It doesn't appear to have any functionality for auto-linking bug #'s.
Also, I'm unclear how you would retrieve the comment object(s) given a
dsd object, but if it's not exposed in some fashion already, probably
wouldn't be hard to expose it (I can investigate further if there's
interest.)

Anyway, in theory it seems like if MoM could query Launchpad for these
comments, then the issue of merge comment fragmentation would be
lessened.  Looks like some work is needed before this integration could
be done.

Bryce