launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think timelines would be a huge improvement in Launchpad: at the
moment people basically get this in their mail inbox which is barely
adequate.  Somebody just recently asked in another thread about adding
notifications of the type you get on askubuntu.com etc.

I think you could usefully have notifications visible in the Launchpad
web ui and also federated out to eg Zeitgeist running on the client,
xmpp, couch, twitter, whatever.

The path to land this, it seems to me, is:

 * once this thread matures, add an enhancement proposal in
http://dev.launchpad.net/LEP
 * regarding running zg in the datacentre - let's set the requirements
for a federation server, then see if it fits; I'm not quite sure what
responsibilities it would have
 * try a spike that sends at least one kind of notification in the
simplest way possible

Changing Launchpad is (sorry to say but I'll be honest) pretty hard.
So it's very good to look for something that will not run you into a
dead end, but also will let you get at least one thing working along a
short path.

Perhaps the shortest meaningful spike would be to emit notifications
about just one type of event, such as a bug being commented-upon, and
to show them only in a newly added page in the web ui.  Then we can
build on that.

The kind of dead ends you should be careful of in specifying it:
 * privacy, as Robert says, is a big thing
 * scalability/performance: we don't want for example to require that
every user's notifications go through a single zeitgeist daemon; it
almost certainly won't scale.  can notifications be strictly
segregated by user?
 * locking things to a particular notification transport mechanism

-- 
Martin