Launchpad PPA: Canonical's Developer Service Launched
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution has just launched its "Launchpad Personal Package Archive Service" for developers on the Canonical "Launchpad" platform.
The Launchpad Personal Package Archive Service (PPA) is designed to support collaboration between developers on software projects. The service offers a number of collaboration and community tools for this. A team management tool, bug tracking and localization or translation tools, a blueprint and response tracker are also included. The bug tracker attempts to collate reports and conversations on specific bugs. To do so, it accesses external sources such as Bugzilla, Roundup, SourceForge, and the Debian Bug Tracking System.
PPA gives developers and smaller development teams the ability to collaborate on software projects. One gigabyte of archive memory is available to developers for uploading source code for collaborative manipulation. Launchpad also helps with building and acts as an apt repository for software distribution. Once development is complete, normal users should be able to access prebuilt packages and install them on Ubuntu. Launchpad supports package building for the x86 and AMD64 platforms.