launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/10/6 Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Howdy,
>
> I want us to have one place where anyone in the Canonical LP team, and
> related people such as the sys admins (LOSAs), can announce
> service-affecting issues.
>
> The most important thing, for me, is that someone should be able to
> check one source and, if there's nothing there, be reasonably sure
> that the issue they've experienced is neither planned nor known about
> by Canonical people. So, we need a place to do that and also a
> process.

Yes, heartily agreed.

>
> I think the easiest way to do this is to set up an identi.ca account
> as that give us:
>
> * A single page where you can find the latest status info
> (identi.ca/launchpadstatus)
> * Forwarding to a Twitter account (twitter.com/launchpadstatus)
> * An RSS feed (https://identi.ca/api/statuses/user_timeline/launchpadstatus.rss)
> * No reliance on Launchpad in order to function.

I think that's a great idea ;-)

We seem to already own @launchpad so I think we should just put it
there rather than fragmenting into a separate channel.  I don't think
it's worth fragmenting them: people who want to know about Launchpad
generally should be interested in outages, and people who're wondering
"is it down or is it just me" won't mind also seeing feature news on
that page.

> As a bonus, we don't have to spend ages discussing how an automated
> status page would work ;)

+1

>
> Right now, we have a page on the blog (/maintenance), a
> "notifications" category on the blog, the general Launchpad
> Twitter/identi.ca accounts, the launchpad-announce list.
>
> Anything that requires more explanation could still be posted to the
> notifications of the blog and anything that pretty much every LP user
> needs to know about should go out to the -announce list. I'm not sure
> what to do with the maintenance page, other than move it to the dev
> wiki; I think we could use it to list planned maintenance times, as we
> do now, but the identi.ca page should do that. The only advantage, I
> see, of retaining the maintenance page is that it allows us to show
> fairly far off into the future what's planned, whereas the identi.ca
> account would be a moving target.

I think the maintenance page is fine as it is, it should just point to
the microblogging pages.

It would be good to have links to there from the top of
help.launchpad.net and possibly even from the footer of every page.
(Why?  Because tweets are a good way to communicate about stuff
generally, and because if it's failing and help.l.n can't be reached,
people may still have a page showing the footer.)

> The process side would be fairly simple; I'll work something out if
> people feel this idea is a go-er.

The only other thing to mention is that it's important that access to
this account be widely distributed to responsible people.  I've
tweeted about lp being down or back up, but only in my personal
account.

The best process would be that someone check with LOSAs/etc what the
actual status is, but that tweeting the status is not a burden on the
people working to fix the problem.  It should actually save them from
repeated questions.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>