3rd party API keys

Access control only exists at the level of entire branches. (As far as I know this is true for all modern hosting sites, and it's certainly inherent in the design of both Bazaar and Git.) Furthermore, private branches are a paid feature on Launchpad. Much though I probably ought to be trying to sell you that, a private branch would be massive overkill for this kind of thing.

What I think you should do instead is have the API key be a build parameter for your project. That way, when you're doing your release builds, you can specify the "secret" API key, and document that anyone else who wants to build your project needs to get the third party to issue them their own API key.

Hi Colin,

Thank you for your answer.

Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not sure what you mean. I searched Launchpad for "build parameter" but found nothing. Can you please elaborate a bit?

Thank you
Peter

This is not a Launchpad-specific thing. Most software build systems support some way to pass properties of some kind into the build; e.g. with the GNU autotools you can set things up to do something like "./configure --with-api-key=foo". You'd have to work out how to do something appropriate depending on the way your project is built.

OK I see what you mean.

I'm using recipes to auto-build my branch on Launchpad. So I would have to write that key somewhere into the branch (qmake .pro file for example), which would mean it'd be public info. Mind as well put it in the source code. Same if I put it into build rules.

I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem.

Anyways, I will figure out something. Thank you for taking the time to answer.

It is indeed not possible to have a recipe build something where some parts of the build need to be secret. In order to meet your requirements you'll need to use a different build process.

:(

Anyways, thank you again.