launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Tom Berger <tom.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1123-free-software-project-hosting

The author is surveying several "project hosting" solutions.

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Launchpad is the project management service operated by Canonical, the
company behind Ubuntu. While Launchpad can optionally integrate well
with Ubuntu, that isn’t required, so non-developers like me can work
with it fine.

Launchpad does offer issue tracking, but no wiki. It has a forum of
sorts though (the “Answers” section). It has some other features, such
as blueprints, that would likely only be useful for projects larger
than the ones I would plan to use it for.

It does have a downloads area, and they say they have a Python API. I
haven’t checked it out, but if it supports scriptable uploads, that
would work for me.

Besides the lack of a wiki, Launchpad is also tied to the bzr VCS. bzr
was one of the early players in DVCS, written as a better-designed
successor to tla/Arch and baz, but has no compelling features over Git
or Mercurial for me today. I have no intention of switching to or
using it any time soon.

Launchpad does let you “import” branches from another VCS such as Git
or svn. I set up an “import” branch for a test project yesterday. 12
hours later, it still hasn’t imported anything; it’s just sitting at
“pending review.” I have no idea if it ever will, or why setting up a
bzr branch requires no review but a git branch requires review. So I
am unable to test the integration between it and the changesets, which
is really annoying.

So, some possibilities here, but the bzr-only thing really bugs me.
And having to have my git trees reviewed really goes against the
“quick and simple” project setup that I would have preferred to see.
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