launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Karl Fogel wrote:

>>> 14:45 - 15:15 Code imports, code reviews and patch forwarding - jelmer and
>>> abentley
> 
> This one has the potential to be really exciting.

Extremely.

> At the end of the
> Grand Vision: every upstream's code is available (and up-to-date) in
> Launchpad; anyone can branch it; anyone can post a branch with a change;
> anyone can get that new branch in patch form; any patch out there on the
> Net can be automatically represented as a branch against that project's
> VCS import; you can build a package from any branch, to enable users to
> test the patch that that branch represents... This is huge stuff.  We
> may not be implementing that all at once, but I think it's important
> that the audience understand the big picture as well as what's coming in
> the immediate future.
> 
> How to convey all that in a title?

In terms of title, you can either appeal to power users wanting to
improve their favourite software or upstreams wanting more (casual)
contributors. My gut feeling is to aim for the first because it's a far
bigger crowd. :-) The latter falls-out implicitly as well IMO.

The tutorial I wrote called "Contributing to Free Software Projects Made
Easy" [#] took the former approach. Writing/reading that, we're amazing
close to an uber-cool "open-source supermarket" already. The main bits
needing some attention are:

* better code imports of popular projects (the hottest100 project)

* nicer sending of changes to upstreams in the native VCS "bundle"
  format, e.g. git patch bombs, hg bundles, svn diffs. For example,
  qsend needs numerous UI improvements including a "format" combo.
  It would also be nice for LP to have a way of downloading
  merge proposals in those various "foreign" bundle formats.

Ian C.

# http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/explorer/en/tutorials/foss-contribute.html