Giving developers access to requeue package imports [Was: Ubuntu Platform developers BOF session?]

[Serge Hallyn]

Quoting Stéphane Graber (stgraber at ubuntu.com):
> On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 03:33:59PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> > On Nov 13, 2013, at 11:32 AM, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > 
> > >But I think it would be more interesting to get a permanent fix for this
> > >bug:
> > >
> > >  https://bugs.launchpad.net/udd/+bug/714622
> > >
> > >This accounts for the problem people have mentioned, that core packages are
> > >much more likely to have failed imports.  The importer badly needs fixed to
> > >not throw up its hands when the revision ID of a tag has changed; it should
> > >only care about this when the branch contents are wrong.
> > >
> > >This single bug accounts for just under half of all importer failures, and
> > >is a failure scenario that the importer *could*, with sufficient smarts,
> > >resolve automatically.
> > 
> > This may be controversial, but (except for trying to fix error conditions), I
> > think we should disallow all developer pushes to UDD branches and only let the
> > importer write to them.  It's simply too error prone otherwise, and there's no
> > good reason for it.
> > 
> > One possible reason for developers to push to UDD branches is to share the
> > code with other people, or to avoid the lag in importer runs.  Of course the
> > former can be easily handled by pushing to a personal branch.  The latter?  Oh
> > well, I can live with that for error-free branches. ;)
> > 
> > A long time ago I decided never to push UDD branches and always let the
> > importer update them.  I've never regretted that or encountered problems with
> > that discipline.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > -Barry
> 
> Hmm, so if we can't planned changes to UDD branches and have to use a
> separate user-owned branch for that, then what's the use of the UDD
> branch?
> 
> It sounds to me like it'd then be much easier for me to just maintain my
> own branch on the side and upload from there, ignoring UDD entirely,
> which surely isn't what we want there.

Let's say three of us are working together on the next release of
package foo.  While ironing out a new feature, we want to stash a
low prio bugfix to go into the same release.  This happens quite
often, and a UDD branch that we can write to is a nice place to
stash these.  Otherwise, yes, we simply need an out-of-band shared
tree.

Of course then the importer has to deal with differences.  When I first
started looking at UDD, it took me awhile to realize that there was no way
to feed a tag to the UDD branch to say 'now build source packages and
push from that to the archive' :)  I would have expected that, plus an
error message on dput if there is a conflict in the udd branch.

-serge