Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/22/ubuntu_next_launchpad/
Canonical hippies spread Ubuntu Launchpad love
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Posted in Developer, 22nd July 2008 18:38 GMT
OSCON Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, next week plans a major update to its massive code hosting and project management platform Launchpad.
Version 2.0 will introduce improved support for third-party application lifecycle tools used to find, report and fix bugs in Ubuntu - plus the applications and 6,000 projects in the ecosystem around it. Canonical has been talking up the new service at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).
Launchpad 2.0 will feature a beta version of a planned API that'll allow third-party applications to authenticate, query and modify data in the massive Launchpad database, without a user needing to manually access the system via a browser.
There's no word on final availability, but this is expected with the next update during the next year.
A set of GPL plug-ins will be provided that let you plug Bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org/) or Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) into Launchpad, to find and fix common bugs and share comment histories. The Bazaar version control system has been updated to support a larger number of projects.
Bazaar got an endorsement earlier this year when Sun Microsystems' popular MySQL moved (http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/06/19/version-control-thanks-bitkeeper-welcome-bazaar/) all its code trees from Bitkeeper to the Canonical-sponsored system.
Launchpad project manager Christian "kiko" Reis told The Reg the plan is to support an even larger variety of bug trackers and version-control systems, beyond just today's Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/) and CVS (http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/). "People have chosen GIT (http://git.or.cz/) and Mercurial (http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/). We should support those - you should be able to exchange packages and update code," Reis said.
Applications and projects on Launchpad don't necessarily have to be running on Ubuntu, but - clearly - reporting bugs in those that do will help improve detection and usability for the Ubuntu combo.
"The place where you have the most connection is the distribution - that's why Ubuntu is the driving force for Launchpad, we feel the pain so acutely," Reis said. "Launchpad is about exploring the commonality between these projects."®