The Road Ahead

This is exactly what we've been doing for the second half of 2010. We're behind schedule, but we're committed to doing these until we get them right.

Performance

Launchpad is too slow, make it faster.

Status: We have driven down our hard timeout from 30s to 5s. 99.9% of all page renders happen in under 5s.

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.

See our LEPs:

• LEP/BetterPrivacy

Longer-term ideas

These are ideas that we would like help from the community to implement.

Unified, consistent activity

At the moment, there is absolutely no way to look at a project in Launchpad and see what's happening. There are fragmented lists broken down by each component of Launchpad, but no clear view of activity. Likewise, there's no similar view for a person or a team.

We would like to bring all of these views together to make "what's happening" extremely clear. Quite possibly, at the same time we'll review Launchpad's reward system.

Personal and project dashboards

Launchpad is about helping people make excellent software. The very least it can do with this is to make three things clear to its users:

1. What must you do?
2. What could you do?
3. What things are you waiting on from other people?

It should be possible to see these things at a project level (e.g. "what do I have to do for this project?") and a personal level (e.g. "what do I have to do for all of my projects?").

Better tools for QA and Release Management

Serious projects need to be able to manage bugs seriously. They need to be able to postpone bugs to future releases, see the rate of bug filing and bug fixing, burn down progress toward a release.

Consistent issue tracking

The blueprints part of Launchpad has been left behind. We should unify the bug & blueprints trackers without sacrificing the important distinctions between a defect, a specification and a plan for enhancement.

Archives for everyone!

PPAs have been really popular. However, tying them to a team or person isn't really good enough for many uses. In particular, upstream software projects often want to maintain their own archives. We should have archives associated with projects, rather than teams or people.

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.

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.