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Ubuntu Open Week - Launchpad Q+A - Kiko - Tue, Apr 24, 2007

TZ UTC

[18:00] <kiko> hello hello
[18:00] <kiko> and welcome to one more round of Launchpad Q&A :)
[18:03] <kiko> thanks to everyone for showing up
[18:03] <kiko> it's always hard speaking /after/ mark :)
[18:03] <kiko> I run the Launchpad project, together with Steve Alexander, my alter ego currently in Amsterdam
[18:04] <kiko> we have a team of 20+ developers building features, ensuring quality and planning ahead
[18:04] <kiko> in previous sessions I've done a lot of covering the basics
[18:04] <kiko> explaining why we are doing Launchpad
[18:04] <kiko> what it's useful for
[18:04] <kiko> why we think it is key to collaboration in open source
[18:05] <kiko> given this is a Q&A session, however, you get to choose what I explain :)
[18:05] <kiko> so post your questions to #ubuntu-classroom-chat
[18:05] <kiko> and I will do my best to cook up good answers to them
[18:05] <kiko> and if they are not good, well.. I can blame brazilian narcotics!

<ditsch> Are there plans to merge the answers section with forums or mailing lists?That would be nice since the answers section is not that common to users, I think.

• there are plans to integrate mailing lists as a Launchpad offering. we haven't considered yet the link to the specific applications. and I'm not sure it would be easy to find a trivial link to the answer tracker because of the way the questions and answers are posted. perhaps it is possible to model the individual conversations as threads and offering a mailing list digest of the questions and answers. it's a possibility. however, note that the answer tracker offers a full email interface. meaning that questions posted can be replied to via email and the answers are handled properly. so there is something of the convenience of a mailing list there -- albeit not with mbox exports

<laszlok> QUESTION: If there's a bug for launchpad that's being ignored for whatever reason (you guys are probably very busy) is there anything else a launchpad user (with programming skills) can do? Do I have to wait for one you guys to get around to deal with my small bug? Theres a lot of small things that could easily improve launchpad, but most of you guys seem busy with more important things.

• this is actually a shortcoming in our development process and one which we are seriously intending to address. now so far we have been working hard to produce a feature-complete 1.0 release. based on an original roadmap that mark and the team put together over 2 years ago. (I'm thinking about the answer so we are working hard to put in place a better release process for launchpad. up to now we have been really chasing hard our feature list but we are now at a point where the releases will be publically planned ahead and a clear roadmap will be made available so that people can check what we are doing. I also want to point out that you /can/ as a user hop on to #launchpad and provide us with advice and suggestions to fix your favorite bugs

<DoctorOwl> QUESTION: Is Launchpad only for projects that run on Ubuntu? And if not, how would you compare it to another offering like Sourceforge?

• Launchpad is definitely not for Ubuntu only! Ubuntu was our first official user and definitely one of the most important. however, there are many projects, large and small, that are adopting Launchpad. you can use as much as Launchpad as you like if you want to try out the bug tracker, you can do so without committing to doing translations or answer tracking. so it is really a lot easier that taking up a whole new project management system. some of our newest and more visible projects include Zope and Silva but just browse the product listing and you'll get an idea of how many different products are registered and officially using Launchpad.

QUESTION: The about page said there are tools to convert from other services to launchpad. Is one of those tools sourceforge -> launchpad?

• the answer is that yes, we have custom importer for different bug trackers and you can request an import if your project is considering moving to Launchpad. so if you want to try Launchpad out come talk to me on #launchpad and I will help sort it out for you.

<McKinney> Question: what do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of launchpad?

• whew. it's always easy to list advantages a few of the more visible ones:

  • - single integrated platform for managing your project: translations, bugs, specifications, code and user support, all in one consistent and publically-available UI - a commitment from Canonical to run the Launchpad servers for you, and to maintain a high quality of service, and good turnaround on questions and problems. - a collection of great developers and a user community discussing features and implementation openly - the integration with other projects. you get easy access to bugs and translations coming in via the Ubuntu project, which is an amazing magnet. - you can also participate in the discussion of a bug with other projects if you share the issue. Launchpad was really conceived to facilitate this interchange

    - of course, the most sympathetic and friendly project managers you will ever run into

  let me try answering the second half there which is definitely not an easy one namely, disadvantages with taking up Launchpad we don't natively support CVS or Subversion repositories as Sourceforge does so that's one thing you should keep in mind; however we do offer an import service that converts those to Bazaar (bzr) branches so it is easy to let developers try Bazaar out if they are considering changing over Launchpad has its own particular UI, and while many people like it, some do not. we don't really offer much in the way of UI customizability today, but we may soon. so if your project is considering shifting, that's something to consider discussing with your user community.

(I should have pointed out that that was an additional disadvantage -- you need to ask us for exports of data today, we haven't automated the process)

<DoctorOwl> QUESTION: Where do you think Launchpad will be in a years time? <chapular> QUESTION: So what do you think about the open source philosophy extending in to the real world? i meant outside of software and computers into real world interactions

• can I choose cellojoe's question? in a year's time we will have a number of interesting features available in Launchpad. I will try not to get fired by discussing some of them with you

  • - we will offer a system to let end-users easily produce and offer distribution packages - we will implement integration with mailing list services and offer that as an additional Launchpad feature

    - we will offer an automated FAQ system that makes it easy to build answers based on Q&A coming from the answer tracker - we will implement much more interesting XMLRPC API that allows you to query Launchpad for objects representing your data

  okay. I have given up 4 features and now I am getting flak in the back so I will have to stop

<xerosis> QUESTION: Is there a plan/wish to get other distos using LP? How feasible do you think this is

• we definitely wish other distros were using LP. it would be interesting to see all the Ubuntu derivatives move on, because it's an easy step for them but there are significant advantages in having all this information kept in a single place. so yes, and if there are other distros that want to move over, please by all means talk to me!

<chuckf> QUESTION: Is it possible as a team admin to unjoin 'my' group from another that I was joined to without being asked?

• I'm not sure I understand that question 100%. if you are a team owner you have full control of membership. you can include and remove admins as you wish ah! I think I understand now. sure -- a team admin can remove any member. he just needs to use the +members link

<chuckf> QUESTION: How easy is it to backup/save the cumulative work done through LP?

• we will offer exports on demand to projects. this is really something we will be improving post-1.0 because we want projects to feel safe and rewarded in using Launchpad -- not trapped! if you want an export /now/ please come and talk to me, I will help sort it out.

<xerosis> won't this centralised source of information sit badly with other open-source people?

• so this is a controversial question, but me -- I love controversy. you could argue that centralizing actually improves things, because information which is hard to locate and match up is kept in a consistent and unified view. you could tongue in cheek say "single point of failure" and while that is true in terms of infrastructure we have committed serious resources to keeping the service running and running well. we also try really hard to allow easy access to any data you need and will be providing more features on this front as 1.0 progresses.

<chuckf> QUESTION: Are there plans to expand the critera for karma points to other aspects of the Ubuntu world, i.e. forum contributions

• a strong yes is the answer. distribution packaging, for instance, really needs karma credit accounting. handling forum contributions is something I'm not sure how easy would be. I'm not very familiar with how the forums work but if there's a will there's a way..

<`23meg> QUESTION: Is a translation string search feature being worked on?

• YES. we need to do a database refactoring for this to work without bringing Launchpad down though. you may have noticed that google now indexes translation pages so it's becoming easier to check there but this is a really important post-1.0 feature

<rohan> QUESTION: even though many other projects are using launchpad, right now the general perception is "launchpad == ubuntu". why are proects like kde, debian not shifting to launchpad ? is there any work being done to promote that ?

• thanks for asking that one rohan. I need to make it clear that shifting to Launchpad is a /lot/ harder for a larger project. the community is larger and will have more diverse opinions. the current toolset and process will have been specialized to what they are currently used to. there is a lot more process that needs to be adequately supported. this is the reason why larger projects don't flock en-masse to launchpad (or to sourceforge, for that matter). we are winning them over, but it takes some time. smaller projects find it much easier to move over, because it's easier to convince people, and to adapt processes. that's natural. we want to offer good service to both -- let's see them coming in!

<allee> Has/will lauchpad support distribution of tarballs? I know some projects that only use sf to upload/distribute the tarballs of releases

• allee, YES. definitely planned feature.(and some implementation going on already)

<richb> QUESTION: You mentioned Sourceforge as being comparable to Launchpad, Sourceforge seems to have problems scaling, do you have any projections on how Launchpad will scale when the number of projects increases?

• Launchpad needs to scale. we are looking to serious replication to make it grow as projects come on. replication is non-trivial but it is something we have been considering for a long time. I'm sure we will crack this nut -- we have very good controls on QoS and performance that allow us to gauge how it's going

<rohan> QUESTION: i don't know if it's already answered, but if i am writing a new program, is launchpad supposed to be used "standalone" or alongside some other service such has sf or berlios ?

• the answer is yes -- you can use it for your own projects, just like sf and berlios.

<\sh> QUESTION: Launchpad uses ZOPE as backend for most of the services...using ZOPE by myself as documentation management system in our company, it shows us many pitfalls regarding speed and other things..how do you overcome those things with LP?

• we use Zope 3, which is pretty different from Zope 2. we find the platform really scalable and good to work with. extremely flexible and easy to adapt. it does require some understanding of the platform to ease customization and there is a ramp-up to getting started that is pretty steep. but once you know it you appreciate how well thought out it is.

  <\sh> kiko, are you using zopeDB for hte backend, or another db for storing infos? ;)

  • we don't use the zodb. we use postgresql and a database abstraction layer.

  <\sh> kiko, thx for answering good work :)

  • sure thing

<pwnguin> QUESTION: If Launchpad was open sourced, would it be released under the affero or gpl?

• Launchpad will eventually be open sourced. I'm not sure what license would be used.

[18:58] <kiko> so it's time to wrap up
[18:58] <kiko> and thank you guys for many interesting questions
[18:58] <kiko> thanks!