RFC: Minor collisions handling, both manual and automatic

[James Westby]

On Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:57:19 +0100, Max Bowsher <_ at maxb.eu> wrote:
> I just dealt with a requeue/zap-revids for bootchart to get that import
> going again.
> 
> The importer created various extra and fairly pointless revisions in the
> lucid and maverick branches... all to remove a vim backup file which was
> included in the human-committed branch but not in the archive.
> 
> I think we should do two things to deal with minor collisions like this:
> 
> 1) Automation
> =============
> 
> In the collision detection code, we should have heuristics for pathnames
> which are safe to disregard and still treat a collision as clean. I'm
> thinking of:
> 
> .*.swp (vim backup)
> 
> .pc
> .pc/.version
> .pc/.quilt_series
> .pc/.quilt_patches
> 
> (The creation or removal of an initialized quilt control directory
> containing no actual content is pretty harmless)
> 
> I'm sure there are more.

That sounds ok to me. Provided the branch remains usable I don't see why
these would cause a problem.

> 2) Manual override
> ==================
> 
> We should have a new tool that can be used to forcible add/update rows
> in the importer's meta.db revids table, by package, suite and
> revision-id, so that jubany operators can placate the importer about
> one-off oddities determined to be harmless on human inspection.

Agreed. I just tended to use the big-but-easy hammer of requeue --full.

Thanks,

James