On Wed Dec 02 06:53:49 -0500 2009 Jonathan Lange wrote: > 3. Branches have the owner in the URL, not doing that here would seem > to be inconsistent.
This for me is the convinving argument. Branches have the owner as part of the name, this was decided early on, perhaps with knowledge of issues such as the URLs breaking (happens fairly frequently when e.g. your project matures so it's no longer controlled by ~you, but by ~your-project-dev). As we used this system we learnt more about how it worked and what the edge cases are, such as the interaction with bzr where it stores the expanded URL as the parent, so even if you update the dev focus people still end up at a dead end. Now we have a very similar situation crop up, where we have the same choice to make again, but with slightly differening concerns. It may be that this requires a different answer, but I am yet to see any argument that convinces me of that. It seems that most of the desire to change it is from wanting to avoid the issues we have seen with branches. Therefore I think consistency should win out. As Jono said, if they are different then to the user it can look like another weird LP inconsistency. Also, taking the less-trodden path is tempting because we avoid a pile of known issues, but it does open us up to several new ones, and we will know less how to tackle them. For instance we want inheritence in recipes. Therefore one needs to reference another. In text form this may be by URI. Bazaar has stacked branches that reference each other by relative URI, which has some interesting characteristics, for instance look at the dance that is required to upgrade branches on LP to 2a. How will we store the inheritence in the DB, how will it be presented? I don't know right now, but having the experience with bzr URIs might help us design that. In addition though, consistency has it's own benefits. What if we decide the fix the issues with changing ownership changing the URLs by, say, allowing redirects from the old name. If we had chosen not to follow branches for recipes then we would still have to solve the issues of having one namespace, we wouldn't be able to re-use the work. Therefore I think consistency should be the default, and only if the differing circumstances require a different answer should another approach be chosen. If the existing solution is so bad that we don't want to use it then don't, but also consider fixing up or changing the existing solution. Thanks, James _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
