I'm thrilled to see mailing list support added to Launchpad! We switched Inkscape over to Launchpad for bug tracking
a while back and the community has been loving it.
Our mailing lists are currently hosted at SourceForge. Most of the time they work okay, but there's a lot of little annoyances. Archives are hard to browse and usually not up to date. Administration is a hassle, generally requiring a dozen clicks just to check someone's subscription status. And so on. So I'm really interested in test driving Launchpad's lists and see how they stack up. From what I've seen so far it looks damn sweet. The integration with teams is brilliant and gives *so* much better organization potential than what can be done with our current tools.
So, thinking further afield, what other Launchpad features would nicely solve Inkscape's infrastructure needs ?
First and foremost on the list would be file hosting. When we put out a release we get tons and tons of downloads, especially of the windows packages. Putting an Inkscape .exe on a "normal" server is basically giving it a death sentence; we are absolutely dependent on mirroring. PPAs really aren't suitable, and really are intended to solve a different, specific problem. What we need is just plain old mirror distribution. It would be nice to have access control to limit who can "officially" post packages for a given platform, so like only our OSX packagers can post OSX packages, and so on.
Somewhat along with this, we do thrice-daily automated builds of our SVN tree, and build packages for various platforms. Indeed, a lot of our hard core users eschew our official releases in favor of the dev builds. This works great for them - they risk bugs but gain access to the latest features no one else has. And for us it works great because we get swift feedback when things break. We don't keep every built version around, but it's important to keep some older versions available in case the latest version is completely trashed.
So it would be wonderful to have an automated build functionality in Launchpad that we could hook into for doing all of our builds (not just Ubuntu, but also RPMs, EXEs, and DMGs). One extra nicety would be an ability for people to tag particular builds, to flag ones that have issues, so other downloaders can avoid them.
Next on the wishlist would have to be project forums. While I am a dyed in the wool mailing list user, we have *tons* of users that constantly ask about forums.
Web hosting is another area high on the needs list. In particular, we'd like to see drupal hosting, and/or mediawiki.
Statistics are another feature we'd love to see, particularly download numbers/charts. I used to script a lot around SF to extract interesting metrics and stats, but frequent UI changes kept breaking my screen scrapers.