Launchpad itself

Why project names can be changed only by admins?

Asked by Andrea Corbellini

Running Launchpad locally I see that project names can be changed from the UI, without touching the DB directly.
So why only administrators can change project names? I think that allowing anyone to do this would be useful, but of course I think that there's a reason for not allowing this.

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English Edit question
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Solved
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Launchpad itself Edit question
Assignee:
Curtis Hovey Edit question
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Curtis Hovey
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Best Curtis Hovey (sinzui) said : 		#1

Changing a project name requires some considerations. Project, like people, are meant to be permanent so that URL always work. These URLs are used by browsers and bazaar, once changes thousands of users will have broken pages and broken branches.

This is the same kind of problem that broke PPAs and mailing lists when team and users changed their name.

The admin can change names after the user had had time to consider the consequences of his action.

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Andrea Corbellini (andrea.corbellini) said : 		#2

Thanks for your reply.

I agree with you: URLs should be changed as little as possible. But I think that giving the users more control to their projects or teams would be better to improve their experience.
Big projects may need often to do things like this, and asking an administrator every time may be a loss of time for them. So my concern is that, now that Launchpad is open source, some people may start to run their own LP instances because of such problems.

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Brad Crittenden (bac) said : 		#3

Hi Andrea,

I think the example you cite is the exact reason we do not want to allow projects to change the name/URL. If a big project needs to change names so frequently that it impedes their work to wait for an admin, then that project may have larger issues.

Doing a project rename is a trivial task for our admins and the turn-around time should be very short.

If you still feel strongly about it please take the discussion to the launchpad-dev mailing list.

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Andrea Corbellini (andrea.corbellini) said : 		#4

Thanks Curtis Hovey, that solved my question.