Person chooser should simply accept unambiguous names

[Martin Pool]

Various pages have fields for selecting people. Specs are one example, where one can choose a drafter, implementer, and approver.

These fields currently have a text field plus a "choose" button. In general I really like this design but there are some flaws. This bug relates to the behaviour of the text field.

Current behaviour: If I enter "mark shuttleworth" in the text field, I get "an error occurred". The field is highlighted in red and a dropdown of possible mark shuttleworths comes up next to the text field. I can choose one and resubmit the form.

1. There's only one "mark shuttleworth"; I don't see why I have to reiterate my choice if the entry is unambiguous. Similarly if I enter a userid.

2. Since there is only one Mark, there's only one entry in the dropdown list, and it's selected by default. However Launchpad won't accept the results until I click the entry, making it go by javascript into the text field.

3. "An error occurred" is a needlessly alarming message when all we want is "please confirm I found the right person".

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Point 2 is a duplicate of bug 33145.

We used to match on unambiguous names. We no longer do this because, unfortunately, it is hard to decide on whether an unambiguous match is correct or not -- if I enter "mbp" and your account name is "mpool" but there's a guy called "rombpot", the wrong thing happens. To do this properly we'd need to always confirm unless we got an exact match.

There is the issue of the error message still; I'm not sure if that's a dupe of bug 36878 or not.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

You're right that this is mostly a duplicate of bug 33145 and bug 36878. If 33145 was fixed then it would be more a matter of "confirm this is the right person" rather than "i already told you, you stupid computer". So it's fine with me to close this if you wish.

[Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)]

Fix bug 123898 would help alleviate this problem.