Being a Launchpad Registry Admin

Over the past few months, it occurred to me that by a confluence of Launchpad responsibilities, I am the God-Emperor of Launchpad Registry Admins. I never intended to take this role. I certainly did not covet it. I just realised that there were a lot of data issues in Launchpad that I personally had the power to fix.

One, Launchpad engineers are members of the Registry Admin team because we are often requested to update projects that do have a Launchpad maintainer (those projects owned by Registry Admins). We are thus, the itinerant maintainers of more than 1500 projects. Projects that were missing license information, missing source code, and missing upstream bug tracking information. These are projects that need someone to adopt, keep the data current, and ensure it can be used by any Launchpad community.

Two, Most Launchpad questions are about project and user management, which is the domain of the Launchpad registry app, and I am the only answer contact. When you want a registry admin project updated, or you want to adopt it, I am the person who helps you. I work with all project and team issues. So while all Launchpad engineers are Registry Admins, I am the person who uses the responsibility most often.

Three, I review every registered project, checking that it is legitimate and has proper licenses. Many new projects are gifted to the Registry Admin team, and I provide the missing information. I review 25 or more registered projects every day. I reviewed the 4000+ backlog of projects last year.

Four, The project review form is insane, and it would be easier for me to see the state of all projects if all projects have licenses...so I set the license information the Registry Admin owned projects. And since I was looking at the project page, I updated the home page link and linked the project to an Ubuntu package when I could. I fixed about 1000 projects.