launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Launchpadders,

A couple of weeks ago, the Launchpad team leads at Canonical gathered
in Millbank Tower to talk about what we'll be doing over the next six
months. We talked with each other, we talked with Martin Pool from
Bazaar, we talked with people on the Ubuntu Platform team, we talked
with Mark Shuttleworth, we talked a lot.

Over the week, two very important things slowly began to dawn on us.
I'll talk about one of them now, and leave the other one to hang
tantalizingly in the air like some forbidden fruit that's  learned how
to hover.

The first important thing we realized is that Launchpad was originally
conceived as a way of helping better connect the Ubuntu operating
system to the upstream projects on which it depends. We further
realized that could do that much better than we are right now.

Zillions of bugs[1] get filed against Ubuntu every day.  While some of
them are introduced when the Ubuntu community packages software, many
are really bugs in the underlying upstream code[2].  And quite often
they're already fixed in the latest upstream version -- it's just that
the Ubuntu package doesn't have the fix yet.

Yet even though Ubuntu is drowning in this sea of bugs, it can't
simply forward them upstream indiscriminately. Upstreams shouldn't be
bothered with old bugs; they only want to hear about bugs that are
still in their code. And Ubuntu needs to know when such a bug has been
found, both to tell users that a fix is coming and to help plan
packaging updates.

Launchpad should doing much more to help rescue Ubuntu from this
deluge. With PPAs and source package branches, Launchpad ought to be
able to make it really easy to create a packaged version of the tip of
any upstream, to test against, and to file bugs and provide patches
directly to that upstream. That is, Launchpad needs to make Ubuntu
"Daily Builds" rock. [3]

That's going to be our overall focus now. At the same time, we're also
aware that we need to spend time polishing what we already have. So,
for this month and for UDS [4], we're going to be focusing only on
reducing technical debt, fixing OOPSes[5] and cleaning up the UI.[6]

So where to now?

The Canonical Launchpad team are going to be focused on "bridging the
gap" between Ubuntu and its upstreams. We'll focus on better, faster
bug triage, on making it really easy to get upstream tip on the Ubuntu
desktop and really tight translations integration between Ubuntu & its
upstreams.

Early next week, we'll email out a high-level roadmap of where we want to go.

We are interested in getting real-user feedback about our solution to
better integrating upstreams and Ubuntu developers. If you are an
upstream or Ubuntu developer interested by that problem, please
contact us.

jml

[1] Citation needed.
[2] Citation needed. Really.
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DailyBuilds
[4] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-L
[5] https://dev.launchpad.net/PolicyAndProcess/ZeroOOPSPolicy
[6] http://people.canonical.com/~flacoste/tags-burndown-report.html

PS. If you've read this far, you are probably wondering what the
second Very Important Thing was. I'm afraid you'll just have to wait.