launchpad-users team mailing list archive

["Charlie Poole" <charlie@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I'm posting this info here because a number of folks helped
me with responses on the list or privately and I thought it
would be good to provide some feedback. Also, it may be of
some interest to hear about how a newcomer has approached 
Launchpad and what was easy/hard about moving to it. Finally,
I'm going to ask you for some more help. :-)

WHY LAUNCHPAD

I wanted to break from Sourceforge with NUnit for two main
reasons. First, I was unhappy with how SF was working in
a number of areas and with the facilities provided. Second,
I felt that NUnit needed a fresh start. I won't go into
the details here, but I've blogged about the reasons.

What attracted me to Launchpad was first and foremost the
vision of a site where anyone could easily make contributions
to any project. The details were still lacking but it seemed
like the right direction to go, especially for a project
that was in serious need of new blood. I also wanted to use
a distributed source control system. Aside from the known
advantages for collaboration, I often work disconnected and 
have had to set up secondary systems on my laptop to back
up and restore uncommited work in process.

Another aspect that appealed to me was the relation to 
Ubuntu and the ability to have a PPA for NUnit. Our tool
works with Windows or Mono, but the pipeline from a release
to a deb-src or deb package is pretty long and slow. I'd
like to see us take it a bit further downstream as we come
out with each release so the final packaging happens faster.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED

I've been slow in getting moving on this, having joined in
the Fall of 2007 and only creating the first NUnit project
a year later. This mostly has to do with the decision to
release NUnit 2.5 on Sourceforge.

But it's moving along now...

* The NUnitLite project moved from Codeplex to Launchpad
  in September, 2008 and had an 0.5 release in June, 2009.

* My little nunit-summary project was added in November,
  2008 and just had it's first Launchpad release.

* The existing source for NUnit-2.5 was mirrored from
  Sourceforge in December 2008 and the nunit-xtp project
  group was formed at the same time.

* I just created the new NUnit Framework project, which will
  handle the core functionality of NUnit. Three milestones
  are scheduled and a team is set up.

WHAT'S NEEDED

It would be cool to get some help and advice on various
aspects of keeping this new project moving along. Ideally,
someone who is quite familiar with Launchpad and Bazaar 
could join one of our teams. Lacking that, having one
or more people who can answer "how do you do that" types
of questions would be great.

I'm also looking for any knowledgable advice about how to
motivate contributors and keep them interested. There are
a few experienced project leads I email from time to time
and I thumb through Karl Fogel's book a few times a week
looking for some best practice. But having more folks with
whom to discuss these sorts of people decisions would be
as helpful to me as the more technical stuff.

Thanks for reading this far and  thanks again to everyone
who has helped *me* get this far with my project. If you
have any suggestions or ideas, I'd love to see them.
If you don't want to post here, feel free to email me.

charlie
(AT nunit DOT com)