team owner no longer implies team member

A short headsup about an upcoming change.

A very long time ago the team owner was always a team member. This was changed to make team owners optionally members (sometime before 2008!). However the change was incomplete – there has been an inconsistency in the codebase ever since. For the details see bug 227494.

I wanted to let everyone know about us actually finishing this change though, because for a small number of teams (about 400) their administrators may be surprised when they cannot do things.

The inconsistency was this: if a team owner leaves the team, so they just own it, then they are not listed as a team member. But if they try to exercise a privilege the team grants – e.g. if the team is a bug supervisor – the team owners were able to do this. This setup made it impossible for users to accurately determine who can carry out the responsibilities of a team : the Launchpad web UI incorrectly reported team members.

The fix which will be deployed in the next day or so corrects this inconsistency: Team ownership will no longer grant access to anything that team membership grants.

For clarity, these are the rules around team owners:

  1. When a team owner is assigned (or a team made) the owner defaults to being an administrator-member.
  2. If a team owner deactivates their team membership then they are not considered a team member anymore: resources and access that team membership grants will not be available to the owner at this point.
  3. Team owners can always perform adminstrative tasks on the team: creating new administrators, edit the team description, rename the team etc.
  4. Point 3 allows an owner to add themself to the team they own even if they deactivated their membership previously.

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3 Responses to “team owner no longer implies team member”

  1. Colin Watson Says:

    If you have the information available, it would be useful to have a list of the teams (and owners?) that this affects.

  2. Robert Collins Says:

    I’ve mailed you a db dump of the public teams and their owners. There are some private teams affected but none related to you that I could tell.

  3. Robert Collins Says:

    This change is now live.

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