launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 11:51 PM, Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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
>

Adding another one, +1.

Thanks for taking charge of this Matt.

>>
>> 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.
>

Really, the codebrowse error page should also point to this identica
page. At the moment, it just says "Internal server error".

> 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.)
>

I'm not 100% sure about that one. The benefits are as you say, the
risk is that the footer will become cluttered and that having a
permanent link to our operational status will make Launchpad.net seem
more unreliable than it is. Perhaps these can be disregarded.

>> 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.
>

+1

jml