launchpadblog

We are reimagining the nature of privacy in Launchpad. The goal of the disclosure feature is to introduce true private projects, and we are reconciling the contradictory implementations of privacy in bugs and branches.

Launchpad will use policies instead of roles to govern who has access to a kind of privacy

We are implementing three kinds of policies, proprietary, embargoed security, and user data. The maintainer is the default member of these policies. The maintainer can share a kind or private data by adding a user or team to a policy.

For proprietary projects, the maintainer can add their organisational teams to the proprietary policy to share all the project information with the team members.

For Ubuntu, the maintainer will set the apport bot to be the only user in the user data policy; user data is only shared with a bot that removes personal data so that the bug can be made public. The Ubuntu security team will be the only users in the security policy.

Most maintainers will want to add project drivers to the policies if they use drivers. Bug supervisors can be added as well, though the team must be exclusive (moderated or restricted).

You can still subscribe a user or team to a private bug or branch and Launchpad will also permit the user to access it without sharing everything with the user. The existing behaviour will continue to work but it will be an exception to the normal rules.

Polices replace the bug-subscription-on-privacy-change rules. If you have every had to change the bug supervisor for a project with many private bugs, you can rejoice. You will not need to manually update the subscriptions to the private bugs to do what Launchpad implied would happen. Subscriptions are just about notification. You will not be notified of proprietary changes is proprietary information is not shared with you. Sharing kinds or information via policy means that many existing private bugs without subscribers will finally be visible to project members who can fix the issue.

This entry was posted by Curtis Hovey on Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Bug Tracking, Code, Coming changes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.