Linked branch in translations sharing details page shows branch URL without lp:// prefix

[Diogo Matsubara]

Open https://translations.qastaging.launchpad.net/ubuntu/natty/+source/gwibber/+sharing-details
Link the gwibber upstream series if it's not linked already

What happens:
The "Upstream source branch is ~gwibber-committers/gwibber/2.0" appears without the lp:// url prefix

What should happen:
The url should look like "lp://qastaging/~gwibber-committers/gwibber/2.0"

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

The lp:// urls use the shortest name. For branches linked to a productseries, this is typically lp://product/series, which adds no information.

Instead, the unique name is shown, which is consistent with the branch picker's display. (The branch picker identifies the branch by its unique name, not its url, and shows the url as a second piece of information.)

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

You may be considering prepending lp: to the unique name, regardless of the lp:product/series form, but it's worth considering that these are no longer equivalent. For example, lp:thekraken resolves to bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/%2Bbranch/thekraken/, while lp:~abentley/thekraken/trunk/ resolves to bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~abentley/thekraken/trunk/. The contents at these locations may diverge over time, so we should not encourage users to consider the same by using both to identify the branch.

Note also this picker uses the pre-existing BranchRestrictedOnProduct vocabulary used on, e.g. https://launchpad.net/thekraken/trunk/+linkbranch. So it is a well-established means of identifying branches.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

We use the same picker for every other branch selection and we use the lp: form for the link in our highly-trafficked pages (e.g. merge proposals, branches linked to bugs). If that's bad or inconsistent, then we should fix the picker, rather than make upstream-translations-sharing different.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

It seems you agree that we frequently use the unique name to identify branches, since we use same picker for every other branch selection.

https://launchpad.net/bzrtools/2.3 says "The following branch has been registered as the mainline branch for this release series: lp:bzrtools/2.3" This doesn't tell us what branch is assigned to the productseries. I think this is a mistake.

If we make upstream-translations-sharing the same as other pages like https://launchpad.net/bzrtools/2.3, we will be losing information about what branch is assigned to to the productseries. I don't think that is a good tradeoff. And since we use the same picker everywhere, I don't think using the unique name is a significan inconsistency.

I don't see how changing the picker would fix any of this, since the picker already uses lp: URLs.