The Linaro consortium debuts

Canonical's own kernel team has a git repo already at kernel.ubuntu.com as part of their workflow. If Linaro is going to follow an upstream focused development workflow it would only stand to reason that the utility and efficiency of using a git repo would increase accordingly to interface with upstream.

For any of the deep upstream hardware enablement goals that Linaro is shooting for I don't see how they get around having active git repositories to act as staging areas for bits meant to go upstream. I'm not aware of any important existing plumbing layer project that uses launchpad or bzr for its upstream development workflow that requires hardware enablement development work.

And really this isn't an either or situation. Linaro is really two things...an upstream development push as well as a reference distribution deliverable. Its perfectly fine to do your upstream facing development one way...and your binary release management another. In fact it might actually be better.

The reality is, linaro as a release deliverable distribution is essentially Ubuntu-arm. In fact the launchpad page for linaro says as much.
quoting the project page on launchpad https://launchpad.net/linaro
"Also known as:
ubuntu-arm"

And in fact the ubuntu-arm launchpad project redirects to linaro now. The ubuntu-arm/ubuntu-armel/canonical-kernel team members seem to just sort of shuffling hats a bit. That's the really cool thing about Launchpad... how micromanaged team concept is..and how many of the same people show up on a lot of those teams...over and over again. When you look at the team memberships you get a real sense of how over worked the Canonical engineers actually are.

And honestly all that chair shuffling inside Canonical is fine, as long as the development really has an upstream project focus and patches aren't just pushed into bzr as part of a release deliverable package set to meet a release deliverable bullet point.

Moblin if you remember sort of started out this way too.. back when Moblin and Ubuntu-MID were closely tied together in the Moblin V1 days.

-jef