My Work With Launchpad and Free Software Bugs

I've been enjoying reading posts from my colleaques at Canonical this week about the work they do and how they feel that work contributes positively to Free Software. Even before this blogging meme started, I've always felt good about what we do at Canonical. How lucky am I that I get to wake up every day and work on, with, and for free and open source software?

I've blogged about my love for this work more than once, but I can't let the current meme pass without contributing. So here are my thoughts on what I do every day and how that helps Free Software.

Launchpad

I work on Launchpad. Launchpad is itself free software. That alone is a win for me.

Then there is the fact that:

And then there's all the individual pieces itself that are interesting and useful -- Bazaar integration, code hosting, translations, and on and on.

I'm saying all this to say, there's nothing else like Launchpad -- nothing else that exists to enable cross-project development, has deep ties into a distribution as popular as Ubuntu, is actively being developed by people who love and contribute to free software, and is itself free software!

Seriously, I'm lucky to be part of this.

And then there's my little corner of the Launchpad world.

The Bugs Team

I work as part of the team that works on the bug tracking app in Launchpad. I manage this team, so the majority of my time is spent doing lots of work to coordinate between bugs team developers, the work we have to do, and the people using Launchpad. These users could be any user of Launchpad, both users inside Canonical and in the wider free software community.

Any time I have left is spent in code, which falls largely into bug fixing, doing code reviews, or working on questions of UI or code design. The work I do land feels as rewarding as any other FOSS project I've worked on. I've contributed to Samba and Django, among a host of other smaller or personal projects, and landing something on launchpad.net feels immensly rewarding for its double impact -- the code itself is free and the site is used by so many free/open source projects.

Then, because of my role on the team, I think a lot about bug tracking across all the communities that make up free software. I think about Ubuntu's needs. Ubuntu has a lot of users (some of them highly technical, some of them not) and all of them report bugs in Launchpad. A lot of bugs actually! I also think about the needs of upstream projects. Some use Launchpad, some use their own bug trackers, and some use both.

And my team does a lot of work in this area. We link to and/or sync bugs on Launchpad with over 900 upstream bug trackers. We track bugs against Ubuntu with patches. We track bugs against your project that are fixed in another piece of software. For example, on Launchpad we currently have 72 bugs that are fixed somewhere else.

And my favorite thing about this work is that my team is not complacent about our work. It's difficult trying to get a bugs system that works equally well for a large distro and also for individual projects. I don't think we've really even succeed at this goal. But we're passionate about the problem, and excited by the challenges. We continue to make improvements to Launchpad and are constantly thinking about the issues around trying to share bugs across free software projects.

Beyond Bugs

Beyond all this regular day to day work, we are active in other free software projects, too. I mentioned some of the projects I've contibuted to in the past. I'm currently working on some of my own smaller projects outside work. Devs on my team provide patches to Zope, Storm, and other tools we use on Launchpad. We also have worked with upstreams to get their bug trackers in shape for syncing with Launchpad. Canonical even provided support to upgrade Gnome's Bugzilla install and some of that work made its way into upstream Bugzilla as Bugzilla API improvements.

I could go on and on, but this has gotten long enough I think. I'm grateful for the chance to do what I do, and I wanted to share why I think the work is important.

Posted by deryck on September 16, 2010

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