The Road Ahead
It’s my pleasure to introduce to you the single greatest Launchpad planning achievement for 2010: the roadmap.
For the last few months we’ve been working on bridging the gap between the Ubuntu distribution and the upstreams that it’s made from: making it easier for patches, translations, and bug reports to flow between Ubuntu users, Ubuntu developers, and upstream developers.
We’ve been asking users what they want and trying really hard to listen to them. And, of course, since we’re Free Software now, all of our discussion, development and planning is out in the open.
Still, there are a lot of people who care a lot about Launchpad but don’t have time to follow our mailing list or dev wiki. In particular, Ubuntu contributors are generally way too busy making Ubuntu better to keep up with every thread there. If people who care about Launchpad can’t keep track of what we are doing, they can’t tell us how we can do it better, and they can’t cheer us on when we’re doing it right.
We needed something to keep everyone in the loop. But it needed to be something simple, since we don’t want to spend all of our time telling people what we are going to do instead of actually doing it.
At Kiko’s urgings (perhaps inspired by Jono Bacon’s roadmaps), we’ve prepared a roadmap for the next few months of Launchpad development, in which the highlights are:
- Guiding developers to the most important (hottest) bugs
- Getting patches attached to bugs into the code review system
- Automatic imports into bzr from hg (we already do git)
- Ubuntu packages built fresh each day from the latest code
And of course, there’s more on the roadmap.
We intend to keep the page up-to-date and to keep the URL constant. This means that any time you want to know what we’re planning, you can look at that page and know for sure.
Remember, it’s an expression of intent, and not an actual commitment. If we can figure out a way to better connect the world of open source software, we’ll change the roadmap in a heartbeat.
For those who aren’t content with a high-level overview, you can also look at the 10.5 series on Bugs, Soyuz, Code and so forth. See the page for our current development cycle for a full listing. And, of course, you can keep following this blog for major announcements and items of interest.
I hope you enjoy the Launchpad roadmap, and I can’t wait to hear back from you. Have a great 2010.
