My thoughts on Launchpad

I chose Launchpad to host my project. It's been great to have a centralized place for my code, and I quite like the way bzr works, although it took a lot of trial and error to decide on a workflow.
Here the ways I think it could be improved:

  • Bug number 210535 annoys me like anything. If I want to disable Answers, please stop people from posting questions. Ditto for blueprints. If you're affected by this bug, please go and mark yourself as affected so as to increase this 6 month old bug's visibility.
  • Blueprints should be clearly distinguished from ideas. Blueprints are specifications, goals and design documents that developers will try to implement. It's not a feature request repository. So only approved users should be able to create blueprints, and project managers should be able to delete blueprints that other people have posted. Ideas belong elsewhere, Ubuntu realized this when they created brainstorm.ubuntu.com.
  • They should be PPA's for projects. It feels kind of strange to have a personal repo, but never a project repo.
  • Launchpad is a place for contributors and developers of all kind, not a community of users. For Ubuntu, the community of users hang out in ubuntuforums.org and on the IRC channels. I really question the appropriateness of a team of photographers, for example.

Those are my thoughts. Feel free to comment.