Why PyRoom chose Launchpad
Perhaps shutting out the distractions of the physical world is no longer enough.
PyRoom is a simple text editor that shuts out all the distractions you might find in a more complex editor or word processor, giving you nothing but a black screen that you can type into.
Bruno Bord has driven the project and chose Launchpad to host it. I asked him what led him to choose Launchpad.
Short answer: Because I was lazy, and I didn’t want to hack on a project management system myself. Launchpad hosts everything I wanted: code, bugs, translations.
Long answer: It’s not just the bug tracker. It’s the whole thing. Bug trackers are very interesting to track down tasks, reorder them, assign them priorities, etc. But it’s like playing all alone on a video game while you could have much more fun playing it online, with other people
involved.I discovered Code Versioning System and then moved to Subversion, which was a massive improvement. When I had to download a source code from CVS, I used to copy-paste command lines I didn’t understand into a bash script, and run it from time to time to update my working copy. I’ve never used CVS as a committer, and I’m glad.
I was working in a small web agency where the “revision” system was just renaming the old version of a file/directory “_old”, make a copy of it, and go on with the developement. Of course, when there was another “revision” to “commit”, you had to rename it “_old2”. Hem. Pretty amazing how things can become hellish using that kind of system.
I heard about Subversion, and reading the docs, I instantly fell in love with the syntax. At last, I could version my work with commands I could grok!
I made a quick svn+trac install on our local server, and that was ready. One of the major drawbacks of Trac at the time was the impossibility to track several projects at once.
So I had to build up a trac instance for every new project. Which was fine, as soon as I could make a tiny bash script that did everything from the ground up (svn repository and trac setup).
Anyway. I started using SVN for my personal projects. A friend of mine accepted to host my trac+svn instance for pet projects on his personal web server, and everything was fine.
One day, I moved. And I went off the internet at home for 149 days. Yes. It’s a huge number of days for a geek. At work, it was ok, but it was impossible for me to commit changes about my pet projects.
After months of despair, I finally found out about Distributed Version Control. And bzr changed my life. I could work on my projects offline, commit code, branch, merge, etc, and push it back again in the main repository when internet connection came back — this is true for any DCVS, not only bzr…
But bzr isn’t very well integrated into Trac (yet). And it’s fully integrated with Launchpad.
What’s absolutely brilliant in Launchpad is the fact that any item may interact with another. You can register a branch in a project, or in your “+junk” repository, or you can link a bug to a branch or link a branch to a bug. Once the bug is fixed, you propose the branch for merging. You can build up teams, working on specific tasks on your project: bugsquad to sort out bugs, developers to commit in the main branches, translators, or a just more general team where people interested by the project can get notifcations at any time.
Hence, using LP as a project manager makes sense.
Using LP for PyRoom was an instant choice. When I retrieved the initial python script from ubuntuforums, I commited it into a bzr branch, hacked on it a bit to clean up the code, and pushed it on the fresh new project hosted on LP.
I learned a lot during the first weeks of the project: one of the best practises is to create teams. You are on your own at the beginning, but create a team anyway, and give this team read/write access to the trunk of the project. When people start to get involved, they join the team, and are granted instant access on the main branches of the project.
But the good thing with LP is that you don’t actually NEED to be part of the dev team to send code. For Gwibber, for example, I just hacked on a bug I found with my French locale the main developers couldn’t guess. I just registered a bug, created a branch, pushed my code to this branch, and proposed it for merging. It was merged without me being member of the Gwibber team or whatever. Now the bug may be closed. WIN!
My first contributions in LP were translations, IIRC (into French, what a surprise!). Again, I was not member of any team to translate small strings in my mother tongue.
You see… it’s not just the bug tracker. Any text editor can work as a bug tracker, as long as you keep your tasks up to date in a single file. It’s the whole shebang that rocks.
