launchpadblog

You may have spotted, on the Launchpad front page, a new summary of what Launchpad’s all about:

“Launchpad is hosting service for open source projects that’s big on collaboration.”

One of the earliest manifestations of our approach to collaboration was Launchpad’s ability to track the status of the same bug as it affects different projects. For example, a bug discovered in the Silva CMS may actually be a bug in the Zope 3 web application framework.

Because both Silva and Zope 3 use Launchpad to track their bugs, Launchpad treats that shared bug report as a single entity with the same bug number and a shared comment history. The bug report turns into a cross-project effort to find a fix for everyone, while both Silva and Zope 3 keep track of how the bug affects their projects through separate statuses, assignees and so on.

Now, if that same bug also affects a project that tracks its bugs outside Launchpad – say, in Sourceforge or the Debian BTS – then it’s harder to share a comment history. Instead, Launchpad links to the bug report in the external tracker and imports it status. If the bug gets fixed by the other project, everyone working on it in Launchpad can see straight away.

However, we’re committed to the idea that a shared comment history in effect creates an ad-hoc, cross-project, team to fix the bug. A project’s choice of bug tracker – in so far as is possible – shouldn’t prevent them from taking part in that conversation.

That’s why we’re about to launch a beta test of two new GPL plugins that make it easier for Launchpad to interact with Bugzilla and with Trac. Once they’re released, the plugins will enable Bugzilla and Trac instances to share bug comment histories with Launchpad.

We’re on the look-out for people to help us test the plugins. If you’re interested, drop us a mail.

This entry was posted by Matthew Revell on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Cool new stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.