Bind branches to product series

Status: Very rough draft. Please edit.

Blueprint: branch-product-series

Outline derived from David Allen's "Natural Planning Model". Not sure how useful the last two sections will be here. -- jml

Currently, branches in upstream projects are bound primarily to that project and in general have no link to a product series. This specification discusses how Launchpad might work if all branches had an associated product series.

Actually, it's not precisely a spec. It's more of a document to focus discussion.

Purpose (Why are we even talking about this?)

• We are seriously thinking about making source package branches belong to distroseries, and we want there to be consistency between upstream and distro.
• Part of Launchpad's value comes from being a reliable reflection of activity. Binding branches to series might improve Launchpad's ability to show currently active branches.
• By binding all branches to users, we might encourage them to place a greater focus on regularly releasing software. (Not sure how this works, but it's been raised -- jml)
• It's complex, there are a lot of edge cases and it'll be a lot of work, so the discussion is worth writing down.

Principles (I'd let anyone take over this as long as they... )

• Smooth migration from current model.
• Add no overhead in starting new, small, projects.
• Make the concepts and user interface bleedingly obvious, particularly for CVS / SVN refugees.
• Keep consistency between distro and upstream.
• Break the work down into manageable chunks that each provide value to the end user.

Desired Outcome (What does wild success look like?)

Bazaar interactions

Fetch trunk:

$ bzr branch lp:python trunk

Push up a personal branch:

$ bzr push lp:~jml/python/2.6/fix-something

Fetch a branch of something:

$ bzr branch lp:~jml/python/3.0/another-patch

Brainstorm (Any ideas at all)

There are two relationships between branch and series. The first is the existing relationship, where a branch essentially is a series. This is stored in the ProductSeries.user_branch column. The second is that when a branch is intended for a series. We already have something of that second relationship in merge proposals. Perhaps we can make a bigger deal out of that?

Organize (Turn this into a real spec)

Next Actions (File bugs)