persons with active PPAs cannot be merged

Celso Providelo wrote:

> + For merging PPAs we should:
> +
> + * Reassign all publication to the old archive to the new one
> + * Perform a careful_publishing over the new archive
> + * Remove the old archive from disk.

This sounds like you need some sort of daemon process that checks the owners
of each ppa to see if Person.merged is set, and if so performs the procedure
you describe.

--
Stuart Bishop <email address hidden> http://www.canonical.com/
Canonical Ltd. http://www.ubuntu.com/

That's a good idea, we may perform archive merge on-the-fly.

Is there a mitigation plan for this meanwhile? What will happen when the user decides to merge an account that has a PPA, in production? Is the old PPA just lost?

Hmm... we will in due course allow people to have multiple PPA's, so one option would just be to give one of the PPA's a new name. Of course, if that capability is only accessible to commercial users of LP.net, then it would mean that someone could create a second account, enable their PPA, then merge it into their main account. So perhaps merging the PPAs is the better approach.

As a further complication, what will happen if an account with TWO PPAs is merged with another account that has THREE PPAs?

As long as we require that multi-PPA users are commercial, and that merging a commercial account with another account preserves the "commercialness", then it would be fine to have this result in 5 PPAs on the merged, commercial, account.

fwiw, https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/39961 is a real use case for this one

Further to this, see the recent 'cannot merge users with ppas' bug filed this weel.

Merging PPAs will be pretty hard in the case where they have conflicting files. Mark's idea of assigning the merged PPAs to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th PPA and so on is a reasonable one but needs a lot of work to make that happen.

Robert's referring to bug 676966 which is where we will block merging of accounts with PPAs until we fix this bug.