smoke screen?

I think I need to give Ubuntu the benefit of the doubt with regard to this.
Metrics are important. Everybody could probably be doing a better job on metrics. This maybe be a valuable first step for Ubuntu to get their head around their upstream interaction and start to build a process to push patches more directly.

What I am more concerned about is the fact that this is yet another piece of functionality which is deeply tied to launchpad, and thus not a tool that can be easily propagated in a way that others can use and more importantly extend.

Even if Ubuntu doesn't know how to turn the corner and make effective use of this sort of reporting to get patches moving upstream, other groups may, or may be able to extend launchpad with better upstream patching support so that launchpad becomes more of a two-way communication conduit. It's unfortunately that Canonical continues to keep their most powerful community interaction tools as implemented as part of launchpad...closed.

Would there be benefit to everyone, both Ubuntu and upstream, if launchpad were openly developed such that people could begin incorporating direct upstream patch forwarding? Like how transifex does things for translations. Canonical's failed to provide those sort of direct upstream interaction features that transifex provides, even though the Ubuntu translation community has been asking for this sort of support for years now. And since launchpad isn't open, the community can't dig in and extend the launchpad functionality for themselves.

And now we have the new metric reporting. It's actually sort of cool, and its actually still not open to be extended, as far as I know. You know, maybe there are community people out there who have the desire and the understanding of upstream project processes that Canonical lacks. Hell, maybe those people are in the current Ubuntu using community. And maybe if launchpad were opened right now, this very second, those people would be able to dig in and extend launchpad specifically to include the direct upstream patch forwarding interactions in a way that makes sense and could be tied to the metrics reporting. But Canonical built launchpad in the way that they did specifically to centralize control into Canonical's hands and did not include a facility to push upstream directly.

So as a result, if others see value in this sort of metric reporting and want to also track upstream patch forwarding, they will have to re-invent the wheel completely, instead of being able to start with launchpad as it is and extend it. What this shows is that Canonical continues to want sole control over what community interaction means, for everybody.

Anyone hear anything newer than August 28th concerning an approved roadmap for opening Launchpad? All the references I have found pre-date the Aug. 28th bug ticket comment stating that the roadmap was not approved yet.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad-foundations/+bug/506...

-jef