launchpadblog

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.

Tags: bug

This entry was posted by Robert Collins on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 8:14 am and is filed under 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.