launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Huw Wilkins <huw.wilkins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Launchpad,

The bug subscription work has been fantastic and has fixed inbox 
overload for a lot of us. However we still farm out the whole concept of 
notifications to email instead of dealing with it ourselves.

If we want to think about introducing dashboards in the future we need 
to have notifications in Launchpad. If we don't have these notifications 
in Launchpad we will be in a situation where some of the things we need 
to deal with are in Launchpad dashboards and some are in our email clients.

And yes, if you wish, what I'm talking about gives you the option of 
getting zero emails from Launchpad.

Excluding mailing lists, here are what I think are the three types of 
email that Launchpad sends you:
1. Mail that requires me to make an action (a merge proposal has been 
created with me as a reviewer or a bug has been assigned to me).
2. Mail for an action that I want to know about and on which I might 
want to make a follow up action (a bug I'm subscribed to was commented 
on or a merge proposal was created in a project I'm a reviewer for).
3. Mail for an action that I would like to know about, but I'm not 
likely to take any action (a bug had a tag added or a had a status change).

There is actually a fourth type of notification here and that's the idea 
of activity streams, which are completely passive. I.e. I don't want to 
receive any notifications about an object, but I want to be able to look 
at it and see what has happened recently (this could be for a user, a 
project, a translation etc). We kind of do this in a couple of places (a 
code branch has recent revisions and our bug comment stream has activity 
changes in it). This is the same thing as Curtis mentioned in his "Karma 
means action" post yesterday (or on his blog here: 
http://curtis.hovey.name/2011/11/14/karma-means-action/).

These are just rough examples (pipe down, bikeshedders!) and there will 
be roles in Launchpad where some of the notifications will have 
different importance (if someone is responsible for bug triage it is 
important they are notified every time a bug is filed).

There are also places in our UI that we currently don't feel it's 
important enough to email about but should probably create a 
notification for.

We'll need to do some work on how exactly to display these kinds of 
notifications in Launchpad, but each level of notification needs to be 
reflected by the UI.

I am starting this discussion now so that when we come to think about 
dashboards we don't forget about notifications and think they are 
already solved in Launchpad.

Cheers,

Huw