The "Whiteboards" section of blueprints should be given more space

[Brad Figg]

Since we are all using the Whiteboard section of the blueprints
much more heavily. It would be nice if it was allowed a little
more browser width area. The "Feedback requests" is given
an equal amount of browser page space and yet I've never seen it
used. Can it be placed above or below the Whiteboard section
and the Whiteboard allowed the entire width of the browser
page?

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

It would be nicer is comments were completed. The mode changes were landed. We want to remove the whiteboards.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

The constraint on the width of the whiteboard is due to the max-width CSS property.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Example of how the current settings cause whiteboard tasks to get cut off and look ugly.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

How it looks with the patch added.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

For blueprints that use feedback more heavily, and whiteboard less so, it still looks pretty good.

[Brad Figg (brad-figg)]

@curtis

What do you mean "We want to remove the whiteboards"? Is there a blueprint for that or some thoughts on what you'd replace them with?

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Whiteboards have proven to be a mediocre substitute for comment and wikis. We do not want to implement one every again.

Andrea Corbellini started work to add comment to blueprints.: https://launchpad.net/blueprint/+milestone/10.05 I believe the schema and model changes landed. We are waiting on the UI. We will also require a migration script to convert whiteboards into comment 0.

Your pictures look good. you have my tentative ui=sinzui.

[William Grant (wgrant)]

I don't see how the work item system can fit into comments. They need an editable block of text, which is probably a whiteboard.

[Brad Figg (brad-figg)]

@curtis

Do you have any idea how Whiteboards are being used by the Platform team to track work items and from which our burndown charts are being generated?

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

@bryce, thats so awesome, it would make the day to day work for everyone in the platform team so much easier.
having an actually readable whiteboard section to track our workitems instead of the badly wrapped text would help so much.

@curtis, please have a look at https://edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-work-items-tracker. if there is a better way to track the several 100s of items on the blueprints and if the whiteboard is really planned to be removed, it would probably be good to coordinate between the two teams to implement something new so we can do our work tracking in a different way (i personally dont see a better option than a freely editable textarea, but possibly our UI designers can come up with something thats easier to use than that).

the current layout definately makes readability in our use case a lot harder due to the wrapped text and having the patch as an interim solution until something better is developed would be a massive improvement.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I have a pretty good idea who blueprints are used. I can also see Ubuntu's core developers are the only users of the app. Blueprints is not usable for other projects. I personally think blueprints should be dismantled and replaced with a lighter planning tool that can be used by more than one project.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Curtis, I think I concur that a better tool for the job would be very beneficial, and I too have seen other projects not find blueprints an adequate tool to solving their needs. I don't know if there is already a replacement in the works, but if not I would imagine that to be something that would take a considerable amount of time to develop. In the interim, little tweaks like this one which reduce pain points for specific users like Ubuntu could be worthwhile.

Discussion of a lighter planning tool is probably getting a bit far afield for this bug report, but I'd like to throw out there the idea that it would be lovely to have something which integrated with other task management tools, such as GTG or Kanban.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

There are no official requests for a new system. The only official request we have had was to stop developing blueprints.

I wrote an experimental story and task app that managed specs and dependencies differently. My interest was to make launchpad development planning faster, clarify priorties and dependencies, avoid disputes about completeness, and avoid lose of stories that were dropped/postponed.

[Ursula Junque (ursinha)]

Fixed in stable r10962 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/10962>