Announcing the Launchpad bug plugin API spec
A while ago we announced the beta versions of the Launchpad plugins for Trac and Bugzilla. These allow Launchpad to sync not just bug statuses but also comments and, eventually, whole bug reports with the remote bug trackers that have them installed, bi-directionally. The practical upshot of this is that upstream projects that don’t use Launchpad for bug tracking can install one of these plugins and never again have to worry about not seeing bugs that people file using Launchpad but don’t forward upstream.
We in the Launchpad team realise, of course, that Bugzilla and Trac aren’t the only two bug trackers in the world. A project that uses Mantis, for example, may want its bug tracker to interact with Launchpad in the same way that Bugzilla and Trac now can. Unfortunately we can’t develop a plugin for every bug tracker out there as we don’t have the resources or the in-depth knowledge of those trackers’ internals necessary to be able to do so.
To make it possible for anyone to develop a plugin for any bug tracker, we’ve now opened up our Plugin API spec. The spec details all the APIs that need to be implemented for Launchpad to be able to sync bi-directionally with a remote bug tracker. It’s pretty detailed, and we’ve rolled into it our experiences in developing the Bugzilla and Trac plugins so as to make sure that new plugins don’t repeat the issues that we came across when we started interacting with the first bug trackers to install those plugins.
Once you’ve written an API plugin for your bug tracker of choice you can contact us by filing a question against Launchpad Bugs to let us know about it. We’ll then work to write the code on the Launchpad side that will interact with the API you’ve written. Once that’s done we’ll continue to work with you to iron out any bugs that we may come across.
I’m looking forward to seeing your plugins!
December 4th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Amusing. 🙂
Launchpad has its own bug tracker and still has to explicitly say “We in the Launchpad team realise, of course, that Bugzilla and Trac aren’t the only two bug trackers in the world.”
🙂
December 4th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
This is a good step. I applaud it. In fact in some ways release an extensive API aimed at cross-project collaboration is better than just opening launchpad’s source.
The reality is, we live in an age where multiple implementations for project services are going to exist. No one codebase, no one service, is going to encompass all open ecosystem development. We as a distributed set of projects and communities need to figure out how to have our tools talk across those project and community boundaries. Having a set of APIs that cover as many aspects as possible are the way to go.
So now that you’ve started releasing a set of APIs that are launchpad specific. I challenge you to take the next step and coordinate a discussion with other tool developers about how to craft a set of APIs that all collaborative tools can code for so information can be shared across projects as easily as possible.
-jef
December 5th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Hi! I’ve just created a report submitted to the MantisBT tracker covering this topic, #9940 [1]. However, I would like to point out that the proper URL to the MantisBT project is http://mantisbt.org – no hyphen. Thank you, and we look forward to allowing upstream projects using our software to integrate with Launchpad!
[1] http://www.mantisbt.org/bugs/view.php?id=9940
Cheers!
December 18th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
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