14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has started to improve Launchpad again, and developers have made a number of changes and improvements. It looks like the recent Git integration is not the only new feature that will be made available.
Not many people know this, but Launchpad was in maintenance mode for a very long time. Basically, Canonical felt that the product did its job, and the devs didn't need to have anything more. As it turns out, there are a lot of things that could work better, and they are some outstanding bugs, so Launchpad has been brought back from hibernation and new features are being added.
When an application is in maintenance mode, it means that only critical updates are being made, usually the ones that pertain to security. On the other hand, Launchpad has become a very important tool for Ubuntu users as well, not only for developers, so it would be a shame not to improve it and make it better.
Launchpad is improving under our eyes
"It’s been awhile since we posted much regularly on this team blog, not least because for a while Launchpad was running more or less in maintenance mode. That’s no longer the case, and we're back to the point where we can do feature development work again, as exemplified by our recent addition of Git code hosting support. Lots of other things have been happening in the Launchpad world lately, though, and the half-way point in the year seems like a good time to start talking about them," said Colin Watson, one of the developers working on Launchpad.
According to the extensive changelog, Git-based merge proposals can now be deleted, pushing to private repositories no longer hangs, the project +sharing view now handles Git, branches in private repositories now show a privacy banner, repositories can now be deleted, and many more fixes have been implemented.
More details about the Launchpad revival can be found in the initial report.