broken branches can clutter up branch listings and confuse users

Bug #368312 reported by Jonathan Lange
16
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

There are many branches on Launchpad that are simply broken. Normally these are because of interrupted pushes or due to connectivity errors when mirroring branches.

It would be nice if branches that are broken, particularly those that have never ever had useful Bazaar data were simply hidden on the normal branch listings. Instead, they could be viewed on a special broken branch dashboard that includes full error messages and provides some buttons for deleting and re-mirroring branches.

Tags: lp-code ui
Revision history for this message
Jonathan Lange (jml) wrote :

I've done some work on this, but it's a bit out of date.

Changed in launchpad-bazaar:
importance: Undecided → Medium
status: New → Triaged
tags: added: ui
Revision history for this message
Matt Nordhoff (mnordhoff) wrote : Re: [Bug 368312] [NEW] Hide broken branches on default listings

FWIW:

I'm not sure I agree. If my bzr server is down for half an hour for
upgrades, I don't want it to look like all of my branches up and
vanished. Plus, I occasionally look at my branch listing page to make
sure none are broken.

Hiding branches that have always been broken is a different matter, and
I'm neutral on it.

A page for broken branches sounds useful, though. Especially if it
provides a button to remirror them all without having to click on every
single branch! (I think I filed a bug about adding such a button?) I
hope it'll handle having dozens of broken branches as well as the normal
listing page does.

Wait, do you want to remove branches that've just had one failed mirror,
or branches that have been failing long enough that the puller has given
up on them? The latter would be less problematic, but I think it's still
happened to me a couple times when something goes wrong in bzr+http.

Revision history for this message
Jonathan Lange (jml) wrote :

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Matt Nordhoff
<email address hidden> wrote:
> FWIW:
>
> I'm not sure I agree. If my bzr server is down for half an hour for
> upgrades, I don't want it to look like all of my branches up and
> vanished. Plus, I occasionally look at my branch listing page to make
> sure none are broken.
>

So, we could possibly have a time delay, so that branches that have
only just broken are still on the main listing.

As for the latter, well, this will actually make it more obvious that
no branches are broken -- there'll be a link that shows the number of
broken branches, and probably a stable URL for the broken branch
control page.

>
> A page for broken branches sounds useful, though. Especially if it
> provides a button to remirror them all without having to click on every
> single branch! (I think I filed a bug about adding such a button?) I
> hope it'll handle having dozens of broken branches as well as the normal
> listing page does.
>

Yeah, mass operations are pretty important. It might not have them in
the first pass, but it's definitely something I'm conscious of.

> Wait, do you want to remove branches that've just had one failed mirror,
> or branches that have been failing long enough that the puller has given
> up on them? The latter would be less problematic, but I think it's still
> happened to me a couple times when something goes wrong in bzr+http.
>

I hadn't thought much about it. Probably ones that the puller has
given up on, plus any hosted or imported branch that is broken.

I guess better notification of mirroring failures would address some
of your concerns.

Thanks for the feedback!
jml

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

By many, is it even 1%? Seems like a non-issue to me in general

summary: - Hide broken branches on default listings
+ broken branches can clutter up branch listings and confuse users
Changed in launchpad:
importance: Medium → Low
Revision history for this message
Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer) wrote :

I used to have a lot of these, especially as long pushes would get aborted.

Now that Launchpad does stacking and performance of bzr has improved it's really rare.

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