User confused by teams

[Jonathan Lange]

A new user reported being confused by the fact that you need to create a team in order to allow others to upload to a branch.

"It's pretty confusing, the fact that I needed a team to allow others to commit to the branch is only documented on a help tab as an aside"

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

Well that is not entirely correct.

Other people can upload their own branches.

Is what the user is concerned with is other people pushing to the same branch?

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Yes. That's their concern.

[David Allouche (ddaa)]

It's true that the requirement to create a team is a bit artificial. We could offer multi-uploaders branches using ACLs. But I am not convinced that it is worth the added complexity in the code and user interface.

After all, in Launcphad, teams are the universal ACL system used for everything. It might be that the underlying problem is that "team" has a different meaning to users than to Launchpad.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Right, I don't think the bug here is in our permissions structure, but rather in our UI or documentation. I'll try to come up with a concrete recommendation.

[David Allouche (ddaa)]

Maybe create a "group" object, that is a team without the icing.

So a group would be the recommended boring object to use for managing group permissions, but teams would have branding etc. and recommended to model real life structures.

Technically, the distinction is pointless, but it might be needed to match the mental model of users.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

I'm not really sure how / if this bug can be fixed.