This evening at OSCON 2008, Mark Shuttleworth had keynoted and talked about driving innovation within free software, the Web, and Linux on mobile devices were among the topics during his 30 minute talk.
In addition, Mark had talked briefly about revision control systems / bug reporting. Of course, he mentioned Canonical’s Launchpad…
The Launchpad team is proud to announce the 1st July 2008 release of Launchpad 1.2.6!
New features in this release include:
* two great improvements to code review, including an email interface
* a new interface for bugs, translations and distribution pages
* and more control code imports!
Read on for more about what’s new and how it affects you.
Code review by email
Launchpad’s new code review system gives you a public place to discuss and vote on proposed code mergers. What’s more, you can easily access the discussion directly from both the target and source branch.
This month, we’ve added an email interface to make it easier to fit Launchpad-based code review into your workflow.
We’re very pleased to announce the results of the Launchpad Logo Contest!
(See https://help.launchpad.net/logo)
The number and quality of submissions took all of us by surprise. We are
immensely pleased with the results and are in awe at what the community
has done. We had so many interesting designs that it was very difficult for
us to declare a single winner. Read the rest of this entry »
The Launchpad team is proud to announce the release of Launchpad 1.2.4 on 1st May 2008!
New features this month include:
Read on for more about what’s new and how it affects you.
The controversial Affero general public license could get an unexpected boost from Ubuntu developer Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s chief executive, has said AGPL is “a strong candidate” for the eventual open source release of Launchpad, Canonical’s developer collaboration tool.
The issue arose in a forum discussion over the future of Gobuntu, the “free” version of Canonical’s Linux-based Ubuntu operating system.
This past few weeks, we’ve had a whole load of high quality entries to our logo competition. We’re heading fast towards the 31st March deadline, so if you want to take part you’d best fire up Inkscape pretty sharpish!
Back in January I shared a couple of the entries we’d had at that time. As a bit of inspiration, in case your arty side is twitching, here are some of the proposed logos we’ve had since.
For those not familiar, “Launchpad is a free software hosting and development website. We make it easy to collaborate across multiple projects.” More information about Launchpad is here: Collaboration, project management and code hosting for free software https://launchpad.net/+about
One thing I like about services such as these, is that I often find interesting (and usable) projects. Let’s see what Ubuntu based projects are hosted on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/projects/?text=ubuntu
The following are just some of the ones that were more interesting to follow-up later:
It’s time for another Launchpad release and this is one with something for just about everyone!
There’s also exciting news for Launchpad beta testers! You can now apply to use Launchpad to run a mailing list for a team you’re involved with. Find out more about the mailing list beta.
Launchpad is kinda hard to describe. When I’m asked what it is, I normally use three or more of the words “open source free software support project Q&A code registration bugs management listing bazaar planning hosting”. Most people make comparisons to Sourceforge, Savannah, Berlios and Google code hosting, and while those are useful, it’s only a part of the picture. The other part, which is perhaps not as well understood, is that it’s also a public project registration service, similar to Freshmeat. Well, except for a twist.
In addition to providing a project registration service open to the public for free (with probably the best Google juice out there; this has caught some people off-guard before!), Launchpad takes this to a next step, and actually provides a unified interface for interacting with each project registered. The most obvious unified service that you can use today is our code directory, which I want to introduce here.
One of the reasons free operating systems are so great is because of their bug reporting features. Ubuntu is no exception. Like most other GNU/Linux operating systems, Ubuntu allows users to file bug reports using its bug reporting site, Launchpad. In the free software world, each user becomes a potential beta tester and gets the chance to contribute to the community without ever coding or writing documentation. Unfortunately, Launchpad’s bug reporting tool often scares away users who have no idea what a ticket, project, or distribution is.
