A couple weeks ago we converted Inkscape to Launchpad. This has been a very beneficial change for us.
The major reason why we switched was because doing bug triaging in SourceForge's bug tracker was so inconvenient and slow (and increasingly laden with ads and such) that people didn't like doing it, and thus it didn't get done. We thought about Bugzilla hosted by GNOME or Freedesktop, but Bugzilla is soooo clunky... I considered self-hosting something like Mantis or Trac (I test-drove installing Mantis a bit, on recommendation from Scribus), but didn't really want to be obligated to maintaining yet another service. Plus, getting the data *out* of SourceForge and setting up new user accounting... *shudder*
I won't go into detail about the actual conversion work, except to say that mrevell and James Henstridge were extremely helpful at taking care of things for us. James had done these SourceForge-to-Launchpad conversions before and bent over backwards helping us through the process, providing a demo version to poke at, and adjusting the scripts to meet our own particular needs. Even though we're one of the larger SourceForge projects, he made the process pretty painless. I'm sure once Launchpad really becomes popular, such personal service may become rare, but it was sure nice to have!
Once we were finally cut over, I was a bit uncertain how the team would take it. We had gotten a consensus favoring the change, and from my own use I knew Launchpad was a darn good tool, but community response to things can be as hard as the weather to predict. From past experience, one of the biggest things that can cause poor reception to change is simple unfamiliarity and lack of understanding. Fortunately this is a straightforward thing to fix, so I devoted myself to putting out a series of "Launchpad Tips and Tricks" emails to the list, explaining the basic of triaging, tags duping bugs, tracking upstream bugs, email management, and graphing bug metrics.
I'm not sure if it was these emails, or just the general love of Inkscape, but people took to the new system like fish to water. I've been amazed the past two weeks at how swiftly Inkscapers have picked up the system and done good things with it.
That said, it would be remiss to not acknowledge that there was some dissent about the change from a couple contributors from Fedora, who felt Launchpad was too Ubuntu-specific. Unfortunately, we didn't learn of their concerns until after the change had been made. I also feel the change would have been easier if Launchpad was open source, but I feel confident that Canonicals' commitment to opening it is genuine.
Anyway, Inkscapers were quickly diving into Inkscape bug triaging and making swift progress. The number of new bugs has decreased from about 1800 to 1500 within a week. Open bugs have also decreased by about 100 over a 1 week period. Exactly what we'd hoped!
I promised mrevell to give a "top five issues" list. Over the first 2 weeks there were several things people mentioned as deficiencies:
- Launchpad should be open source. :-) (50699)
- Bugmail overload. (44545, 150320) When you join the Inkscape Launchpad bug team, you get emailed each time a bug changes. Unfortunately, there's no way to shut off this deluge emails except for unsubscribing from the team (which several people were forced to do). There should be options to allow people to be in the team but limit the email they get subscribed to.
- Feature requests. (176431, 55195) SourceForge had a dedicated tracker for 'requests for feature enhancements' (RFE's) - which could similarly be prioritized and managed, whereas in Launchpad they're mixed together with bugs, and can just be marked 'WISHLIST'. A bit better differentiation would be desired. For example, there should be easy links to report a feature request directly, without requiring a triager to flag it so, and an easy link for listing only WISHLIST bugs. Further, in our conversion, the RFE's mostly came through as 'NEW' bugs, so had to all be re-triaged (not a bad thing, but extra work.)
- Patches. SF also had a distinct patch tracker. In LP these are tracked by checking the "[ ] Patch" box when entering a bug. For the most part this works, however from a developer perspective it is slightly harder to find patches needing review than before.
- Tag searching. (176437) Tags are definitely an improvement over SourceForge's categorization system, however Launchpad gives us just a tease. It would be useful to do conditional searches on tags ("not 'windows'", "printing" and "cairo" or "pdf", "linux-*").
- Selecting assignee. (121378) There is a handy pop up to select the person to assign bugs to, and it's searchable too. However, it searches across everyone with a LP account (a LOT of people). It'd be better to limit it to just Inkscapers.
- Closed bug review. (76744) In Inkscape's workflow, we typically encourage many to contribute, and handle issues by later review (our "Patch first, discuss later" motto). Unfortunately, Launchpad doesn't provide as many post-facto ways to review closed bugs. SF had a "sort by close date" function which was vital to this review process; you can sort of get this by sorting by recent activity, limited to Fixed, etc. but it's not quite the same. Also, there's been confusion about what actually means "Closed" as there's no state by that name, and the distinction between "Fix Committed" and "Fix Released" has been ambiguous to Inkscapers (similarly with Confirmed/Triaged). We'd also love to see the number of open/closed bugs shown more prominently on the main bugs page (a graph would be awesome. Some of the bug handlers miss the richer set of close options (e.g. 'works for me').
- Richer bug list info. (176444) The search results in Launchpad produce a nice clean looking table of bugs. Often when reviewing a bunch of bugs, it'd save time to have additional info - bug reporter, assignee, date of last change, number of comments, and so on. Ideally, one would be able to customize the exact fields to show.
- Freq. reported bug list includes closed bugs. (76744) In general, the bug duplicate finder logic needs to be a bit more clever...
- Easier bug metadata editing. (176449) Currently, if you want to change the title, tags, description, status, and assignee, you need it takes a few page loads to get to all the controls. It would make for even faster triaging to have access to more of these controls from the main bug page.
Okay, so that's more than five. ;-)
The bug mail overload is really the main issue; the others are things we were used to in SourceForge, but could probably live without if we had to. For the bug mail, while it's possible to set up procmail rules and such, not everyone that would like to help with bugs can do it, and for people who download their mail to filter, it can just be too much to download. This is the major bug hindering Inkscape from being able to take full advantage of people willing to assist in managing bugs. It seems that this could be quite cleanly handled on the launchpad end, and make a lot of users happy.