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

[Martin Pitt]

Barry Warsaw [2013-11-13 15:33 -0500]:
> 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.

This sounds like admitting defeat like "these branches are too
complicated to handle". (I couldn't agree more for patches, but for
non-patch packaging changes I don't). So what's the point in having
that then? You have the exact same granularity as the by-upload
changes that we already have in soyuz, except for triplicating the
time and bandwidth to get a package and still having to deal with the
quilt mess.

With that, we lose the important capability of several people
contributing to the next upload, or staging changes which aren't
important enough by themselves to upload.

> 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.

No. It's hard enough to teach people to look at "trunk", we can't
expect developers to search for any existing branch out there before
they do an upload.

> 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.

That's what I do for sponsoring and SRUs (the former because few
people ever get the patch stuff right, and the latter because UDD is
broken for SRUs), but I primarily considered that a workaround, not an
intended workflow.

Martin


-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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