Switching series is overly complicated for project groups

Bug #253317 reported by Joey Stanford
16
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

To setup and switch to a new series in overly complicated, time consuming, and labor intensive, especially for project groups.

Today I have to do the following:

For every product in a product group,
 1) navigate to the product
 2) click register a new series
 3) complete the new series information including setting the new series' status
 4) click add milestone
 5) complete the new milestone information including setting a date
 6) press the back button on the browser twice to be able to click add milestone
 7) click add new milestone for my next milestone
 8) repeat steps 5-8 for each new milestone I want
 9) click on the breadcrumbs bar to go back to the main product page
 10) click on edit a project
 11) scroll 3/4 of the way down the page and set the active series to the new series previously created
 12) click on the breadcrumbs bar to go back to the main product page
 13) click on the previous series
 14) click on change details
 15) change the development status to something other than active (e.g. obsolete or supported)
 16) click on the breadcrumbs bar to go back to the main product page
 17) verify the work is complete
 18) Iterate to next product in the project group

This is painful. Could a wizard be added to automate at least a portion of this? Even one page which would let me create several milestones at once would save me lots of time.

Joey Stanford (joey)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

This is an interesting description of many separate bugs. I don't think it's specific to project groups, though. Indeed, I think it's Invalid for project groups, because I think it's extremely uncommon for all the projects in a project group to have the same series at the same time. The closest example I can think of is Gnome, where most projects switch to a new series at *roughly* the same time, but not exactly, and even there some projects maintain a separate versioning system.

Steps 1 and 18 are because Launchpad is abusing a project group for a single project. This in turn is because Launchpad lacks the necessary search and tagging features to handle Launchpad's large number of bugs. Solution: Fix the search- and tag-related bugs, then merge the launchpad-project projects into a single project. I think if we try to fix this any other way, we'll make Launchpad more confusing for every other project group. (Not to mention QA being unnnecessarily difficult in Ubuntu and every other project, because of the continuing weakness of search and tags.)

Step 3: When registering a series on launchpad.dev, I don't see anywhere that I need to set "the new series' status". Did you mean Summary, or something else? I've reported bug 253393 on the Summary being compulsory.

... That's all I have time for at the moment. I'll look at the other steps later.

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

Steps 4 and 7: Reported bug 274432 that the form(s) for registering a milestone or release shouldn't be on a separate page from the series.

Step 5: The date is optional.

Step 6: I haven't been able to reproduce this problem. On completing the form to register a milestone, I was returned to the series page and able to choose "Add a milestone" again. (But I reported bug 274439 and bug 274443 on glitches with milestone registration.)

Step 8: Reported as bug 274452.

Step 9: Reported as bug 274495.

Steps 10~12: Reported as bug 274498 (and also reported bug 274493).

Steps 13~17: Reported as bug 274502.

Does that cover everything?

Revision history for this message
Joey Stanford (joey) wrote : Re: [Bug 253317] Re: Switching series is overly complicated for project groups

> Does that cover everything?

as far as I can tell, yes.

Revision history for this message
Curtis Hovey (sinzui) wrote :

This may be addressable in the effort to unify series, milestones, and releases.

Changed in launchpad-registry:
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Curtis Hovey (sinzui) wrote :

The trick to all this it to identify the correct series in the sub-project. Naming conventions will work for many projects but not all, falling back to the series is the focus of development may also be right.

We could avoid making a mistake by listing the subprojects that we did not have an exact series match with--let the driver make those by hand. In the past, making a milestone on the wrong series was a disaster, it could not be moved or deleted. It is easy to fix a mistake now--JFDI the milestone and let the driver fix it.

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