set branch/repository permissions and privacy through bzr

[Martin Pool]

As a developer
I'd like to set permissions on a branch when I create it
So that I can control who can see it or push to it.

----

At the moment Bazaar branches inherit the permissions of their containing directory. There are many bugs clustered around either:

 * failing to set the right permissions because of bad interactions with eg sftp or ftp servers or filesystems
 * you can't set the permissions directly in the place you most care about it, the bzr client itself

With a smart server, there may be permissions beyond just the filesystem permissions: for instance Launchpad does both read-access (ie privacy) and write-access based on branch owners and subscribers, and these go through a team system separate from the filesystem database. Bazaar can probably manipulate this by calling the Launchpad Branch.setPrivate rpc.

This probably needs to be considered as part of the ui3 work.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

It would be cool to have an 'lp' subcommand that let you fiddle with branch metadata on Launchpad. E.g.

% bzr lp private
% bzr lp public
% bzr lp fixes 123456

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Barry, I definitely agree.

In fact, I have a branch for Bazaar that adds Launchpad API support to the launchpad plugin. This could be the cornerstone of such a command.