Roadmap

Bug Q&A (also a story) has been postponed, due to the higher urgency of getting reliable upstream bug syncing. First question for bug Q&A (does this affect you?) is done.

You might also be interested in more general information on the current Launchpad development cycle.

Non-thematic work

The table above focuses on the work the Launchpad team has been doing under the theme of "bridging the gap between Ubuntu and its upstreams". Of course, we've done some cool stuff that hasn't really fit into that theme, and plan to do more.

Soyuz

• March 2010, ARM support for PPAs
• April 2010, PPA deletion
• May 2010, SFTP uploads, dedicated build pools

Code

• May 2010, Branch privacy for distributions

The Road Ahead

This section is a draft. Don't rely on it.

We're starting to get some idea of what we think we should do for the second half of 2010. We'll probably change our minds between now and June, but we'd like to start letting you know what we are thinking.

Derivative distributions

We want to allow our commercial customers to create distributions on Launchpad that are derived from Ubuntu. We want them to have full archive building support, great bug filing workflows and full package branch support too.

Privacy, permissions and notification

Privacy is a mess for Canonical's internal stakeholders, permissions are a mess for everyone and Launchpad sends way too much email. We need to decouple visibility from subscription and mutability from ownership and provide a clear, simple way to control who can read & write to what.

Software Centre support

• Archive index

• Ratings and reviews

• User-contributed metadata

Desktop integration

The Ubuntu desktop should be a wonderful platform for developers who want to write apps for the Ubuntu desktop. Launchpad is a core part of the way developers write applications for the Ubuntu desktop. It should be really easy for people to get started with Launchpad. In addition, we want to make sure that the Ubuntu One auth experience and the Launchpad auth experience line up well.

Performance

Launchpad is too slow, make it faster.

About this page

This page is a rough guide on what we're doing over the next few months as part of our current development cycle.

Using the page

Use this page to keep track of what we are planning on doing, and when. If you think "I'd like to know what to expect of Launchpad over the coming months", then this is the page to follow.

We intend to maintain this page for future planning cycles of Launchpad, so if you are at all interested in having a say in Launchpad development subscribe now.

We've crammed as many links as we could find into the page. These links themselves often link to other things. Follow these links and explore the dark and dangerous world of Launchpad development.

The dates

"Dec 2009" means "targeted to the rollout at the end of December 2009". Each month is linked to the Launchpad release milestone for that date, so you can see what we're actually doing.

Note that the dates here aren't actually commitments, they are just our best guesses.

How complete is it?

Sometimes we'll do cool stuff and won't note it down here. Follow our blog for things like that.

Also, this is mostly about Canonical-sponsored development. Community contributors are welcome to join in, but are just as welcome to scratch whatever itches them.

Questions?

This page is maintained by the Launchpad Product Strategist. If you have any questions, contact the strategist, or begin a discussion on the Launchpad users mailing list.

This page is, and probably always will be a work-in-progress. If our plans change, we'll try to make sure you hear about it. If you have any ideas on how we can do that better — or make the roadmap more useful — contact the strategist or make a note on the page itself.