At present the project group (Part Of) field on the project registration page has the following text underneath it:
> Super-project. In Launchpad, we can setup a special "project group" that is
> an overarching initiative that includes several related projects. For
> example, the Mozilla Project produces Firefox, Thunderbird and Gecko. This
> information is used to group those projects in a coherent way. If you make
> this project part of a group, the group preferences and decisions around bug
> tracking, translation and security policy will apply to this project.
Although this explains what a Project Group is in the context of Launchpad it fails to tell the user that Project groups need to be created by an admin and cannot be created by regular users. There should be a means for users to request a project group linked directly from this text.
Thanks for the bug.
This is a workflow problem on project initiation. The registration page at this point introduces the notion of project groups. The page is setup for the situation where the person creating the project knows the name of the project but the page also provides the popup to allow search for a project.
The user only needs one entry box from which they can:
- register to be part of an existing meta-project
- discover related meta projects
- request the creation of a new meta project
(ideally also: convert this project to be the meta project request)
So, a bit more work will make the popup superfluous and simplify user workflow at the cost of either:
- some javascript which alters the original page
- a bit more UI on the original page
Possible workflows:
geotools -> geotools.org org/refractions .net
The user may know of a project group and want to add their project to it
(current)
but needs improvement by confirmation against the database, eg. search
The user may want to add their project to a group but not know the exact name
(current search)
=> note that some users will not yet know *how* to search in the search popup
because we user doesn't yet quite understand what meta-projects are.
Do I type in 'eclipse' to search for all projects related to eclipse?
What are these meta-projects?
How many exist?
The user may not have any idea what a meta-project is
(current info)
=> needs a bit more
BTW, the text is out of date, the mozilla foundation having become a corporation
and that having spun off thunderbird.
The user may want to add this project to a group which does not yet exist
=>They need a way to request the creation of such a group.
The user may realize that the data they have filled in should be for the meta-project itself
Actually, in my case I realized that I wanted this project to be the definition of the
group since this project depends on the following svn sources:
JSR-108 units -> sf.net
jts, jcs -> ?
geoapi -> sf.net
eclipse sdk
udig -> geotools.
yudig (here)
so eventually, I want to create all those projects and access them in one place
(What the user really wants is to create a virtual meta-project for their community)
Perhaps though I have misunderstood launchpad, these being my very first days thinking about how we could switch to bzr.
Thanks again for all the great work,
--adrian