Why is Launchpad Easy
Do you have a launchpad account? How easy was it to get? Have you used ground control and effectively tied your desktop development more effectively to your launchpad account and the branches and bugs therein?
I find the process a little difficult when it comes to ssh keys, and maybe the openid stuff could be made prettier. But over all it’s a very inclusive process that wants as many users as possible, doing as many things as possible.
Compare this to FreeDesktop.org: Process for FreeDesktop.org Registration
Holy Cow! You have to make a bug report to ask for an account, attach your public ssh and gpg keys (make sure the gpg key is visible from a specific server.) and then wait for a real person to process it. Made worse is the gratuitous use of BugZilla, which design wise is a candidate for what _not_ to do when making a complex user interface. I can’t imagine many people going through these hurdles in order to get involved with development, I certainly can’t imagine writing a front end desktop interface for it.
No wonder projects spring up on launchpad, with all it’s faults. It’s better than most other development services by virtue of having processes designed and some thought put into how to make sure it’s as simple on the outside, but still complex on the inside as possible.
I’m personally 3x more likely to report a bug if the tracker is Launchpad, rather than just wait and hope for the best..
LP is for users as well developers, fdo account is mostly for developers, hence the differences. A LP user can get away with an email only if all she needs is commenting on a bugreport.
Hey Martin, nice getting at this topic.
I was just comment about it on Jono’s blog. I find registering an account on LP easy but setting it up completely (with all the needed keys like OpenID, Sign code of Conduct, SSH and OpenPGP keys) a little bit complicated to a **non-it** user, not for us who are programmers or geeks.
About GC, I also tried to use it few days ago as I was trying to get involved in bug fixing (I already contribute with translations) and didn’t succeed – you can see my comment on bug #527978) but didn’t succeeded as it’s integration is broken due to open id. I’m willing to contribute initially fixing bugs and being a python beginner, I still find myself without support as I really don’t know where to start from, how to test and so on… I think you guys should work more towards this direction. For example, it would be nice if it were something like a .net (or java) solution, where one would load the .sln file and that would load all the files, help me to compile and so on. I know python is interpreted and not compiled but, having an IDE to help me editing code, testing and changing glade templates would be nice. What are your thoughts?
Cheers.
Launchpad wasn’t bad, but check out BitBucket:
* you can use your existing OpenID to register (no need to invent & remember another username+password combination)
* the UI for, e.g., uploading SSH keys is pretty slick and modern (although functionality-wise it’s the same as launchpad’s).
Launchpad can be a bit overwhelming at times.