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DRAFT: this page is a work in progress. Please [:Feedback:seek further help] or check the [:TitleIndex:wiki index] for a complete page on this topic.

Overview

Let's look at how you can use Launchpad to plan your project's development and to record releases:

• Series: parallel lines of development within your project, working towards a major release.

• Series goals: bugs or blueprints that will be fixed in a particular series.

• Milestones: points in the development of a series, such as future minor releases or release candidates.

• Releases: previous releases within a series.

Launchpad doesn't impose a particular workflow on your project, so how and whether you use these depends on what value you feel they'll bring.

Series

When we think of the way a project organises itself, there are major lines of development from which releases are "cut". Typically these lines of development represent:

• Development trunk: this is the current "tip" of development across the core project community, representing the very cutting edge of work on that project. In general, the only releases made from the development trunk are snapshot, milestone or test releases to generate more widespread testing and feedback.

• Stable and supported branches: these represent the latest work on the stable versions of the project, which are still supported. If updated stable releases are to be made they will come from these branches.

• Obsolete branches: for major release versions that are now out of date and no longer updated. It's likely that work no longer happens on these branches.

We call each of these "major" lines of development a "series" because they represent a series of releases of the same major version.

In Launchpad, each series almost behaves like a sub-project within the project as it can have:

• branches of code
• bugs marked as affecting that series
• its own translation effort
• bugs and blueprints proposed as goals for the series
• milestones specific points in the roadmap
• releases.

Let's take a look at the [https://launchpad.net/bzr Bazaar] project as an example.

A project usually has multiple lines of development, particularly if it has previously produced stable releases. In the Bazaar example you can see:

• bzr.dev: the current line of active development and source of snapshot test releases for the next stable version.

• 1.3: the latest stable version recommended to new users.

• 1.2, 1.1, 1.0: previous lines of development that produced releases.

Naming a series

It's up to the project what each series represents and what the naming convention is. For example, in the GNOME project, the "development trunk" is a series with an odd version number, such as 2.17. When it is ready for release, it is branched with an "even" version number, such as 2.18. Once GNOME make the stable release, they branch it to create 2.19, the new "trunk".

Sometimes, projects also call the trunk "MAIN", a term from the days of CVS.

For convention, we encourage projects to call their development focus "trunk" and to use that same branch for development over time. When creating a new stable series: branch from trunk, create the series and link the branch to that series. This ensures that people who create a checkout of "trunk" don't find that it goes stale because it has later become a stable series.

When you register a series, the description you give it tells other people what your intentions are. If we look at Bazaar's bzr.dev series overview page we can see that it's described as "...the development mainline where new releases are published".

Series and code

If you have code registered in Launchpad against your current development focus, anyone can create their own Bazaar branch of it using just a few keystrokes.

There's more about using Launchpad and Bazaar together later in this guide. However, for now fire up your terminal and try:

$ bzr branch lp:pyroom
Branched 41 revision(s).

This will create a local branch on your machine of the Pyroom text editor's current development focus. Replace pyroom with the Launchpad name of any project that has code registered against a current development focus in Launchpad.

If you want to get the code for a different series, simply specify the series name after the project name:

$ bzr branch lp:pyroom/0.1
Branched 26 revision(s).

We'll take a look at using series with each of Launchpad's applications later in the guide, including marking bugs and blueprints as series goals.

Milestones