Reimporting the world removes MPs

[Andreas Hasenack]

Reimporting the world is having an unfortunate side effect that it will delete existing MPs on a package that was reimported, regardless if the branch has been merged or not. The branch itself is probably safe, distributed VCS and all that, but the review comments will only remain available in the emails that launchpad sends.

[Robie Basak (racb)]

Note that this affects open MPs as well.

At a sprint we decided, on balance, that no immediate action is needed right now, as the current reimport run is expected to finish in a day or two. But we should discuss further before doing the next run, for example before phasing up any further.

[Nish Aravamudan (nacc)]

I don't think this is with solving or spending time on. It's because of
where/how LP stores MP data.

The fix would be to have a set of packages that fail to reimport and make
existing MPs be a failure case. Then someone would need to manually wait
for the MP to be sponsored (what if the contributor is dead now?) and then
reimport again with some sort of --discard-mp flag.

We don't plan on reimporting very often, and there are very few open MPs.

On Mar 9, 2018 00:45, "Robie Basak" <email address hidden> wrote:

> Note that this affects open MPs as well.
>
> At a sprint we decided, on balance, that no immediate action is needed
> right now, as the current reimport run is expected to finish in a day or
> two. But we should discuss further before doing the next run, for
> example before phasing up any further.
>
> ** Changed in: usd-importer
> Importance: Undecided => Critical
>
> ** Changed in: usd-importer
> Status: New => Triaged
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
> Server Dev import team, which is subscribed to usd-importer.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1754575
>
> Title:
> Reimporting the world removes MPs
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/usd-importer/+bug/1754575/+subscriptions
>
> Launchpad-Notification-Type: bug
> Launchpad-Bug: product=usd-importer; status=Triaged; importance=Critical;
> assignee=None;
> Launchpad-Bug-Information-Type: Public
> Launchpad-Bug-Private: no
> Launchpad-Bug-Security-Vulnerability: no
> Launchpad-Bug-Commenters: ahasenack racb
> Launchpad-Bug-Reporter: Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)
> Launchpad-Bug-Modifier: Robie Basak (racb)
> Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Subscriber (usd-importer) @usd-import-team
> Launchpad-Message-For: usd-import-team
>

[David Britton (dpb)]

We decided today to live with the consequences of this for now, but have two high-level approaches before we next have to 're-import the world'.

1) an automation that pulls out comments + context and description and updates each MP with that information to re-trigger an email to the submitter before deleting the MP

2) (1) except manually.

Once we declare "hash stability" we will no longer accept this approach as an option. For now this bug should be marked as won't fix.

[Robie Basak (racb)]

I addressed this with new behaviour for --reimport - it fetches rich history, reimports, and then force pushes everything with --prune, which removes all refs not pushed. This means that the repository is never actually deleted, so this issue is resolved. Most of this was in commit 7a60e7f.