Granting private PPA access is unclear about expiry date effect or confirmation requirement

Thanks Marc. We'll update both points. Yes, the second confirmation message was not updated after we added the email notifications.

I'd suggest we also update the subscription page so that you know an email will be sent to all subscribers *before* you subscribe them.

If you can't subscribe someone without them confirming it, that's not a subscription, it's an invitation, and the interface should use that word instead.

This is not the case.

The person has a subscription whether they like it or not, it's not an invitation. There's no confirmation step, they just need to retrieve their token to be able to access the archive repo. I think this is a subtle difference.

If I have been subscribed to a PPA but I have not yet retrieved the token, is there anything I can do with the PPA that I couldn't do before?

If so, maybe this should be mentioned in the e-mail message you receive, and perhaps in the introduction to the subscriptions page too.

If not, I think the word "invitation" is appropriate.

Once the subscription is active, in effect the user now has access to the repo. The fact that we delay generating the token until they go and look for it is an implementation detail. If we were to generate the token immediately, they would still need to go and find out what it is so they can amend their sources.list. However, we delay the generation so that it can be ascertained if someone went and retrieved their token.

So, my point is that I don't want to base user feedback on implementation details. As far as I am concerned, once the PPA owner gives you a subscription, you can now access the repo.

That said, I think the wording in the UI can be a lot clearer.

I'm sorry for leading this bug report off on a tangent. I misunderstood the meaning of the term "subscription", but that's now covered by bug 386355.

Fixed in devel r8717.