project owner not publicly visible

https://edge.launchpad.net/pidgin

14:52 <poolie> rlaager: if you're already the owner of the project you can change it yourself
14:53 <rlaager> poolie: I'm not the owner. I'm trying to make a team to represent the upstream developers (of which I am one).
14:53 <poolie> could you ask the owner to change it?
14:53 <rlaager> If that's not the Launchpad Way, I'm open to other suggestions.
14:53 <rlaager> I don't know how to find the owner.
14:54 <poolie> rlaager: what project is it?
14:54 <rlaager> Pidgin

The problem is that owner and registered-by should be distinct but are not for projects.

Currently owner and registrant are the same thing. I agree we should make that more clear and consistent in the UI. What's the use case for having the distinction in between the registrant and the owner?

I'm "rlaager" from the initial description. I'm not sure there's a bug here, given that I've now discovered that you can find the owner/registrant under Lifecycle.

We do show the project owner, but we don't say that it's the owner; instead we pretend that the project was "Registered by:" the owner. For example, I may never know who registered Bazaar, but I'm 100% sure it wasn't "Registered by: Bazaar Developers" as the project page says, because Bazaar Developers is a team and a team can't register projects.

So a minimal fix for this bug would be to change "Registered by:" to "Project owner:", and move it out of the "Lifecycle" box, since it's not part of the lifecycle.

A separate enhancement would be to add a real immutable Registrant field for projects and project groups, set to "unknown" for those registered before it was introduced. That wouldn't be interesting in the normal case (it's not relevant to anyone, for example, that I registered the Mozilla project group in Launchpad), but it might be useful for spam-handling (so that an attacker can't register dozens of Viagra projects and then reassign them all to me, leaving no trace of who actually registered them).

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 1:08 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <email address hidden> wrote:

> So a minimal fix for this bug would be to change "Registered by:" to
> "Project owner:", and move it out of the "Lifecycle" box, since it's not
> part of the lifecycle.

That would be good.

> A separate enhancement would be to add a real immutable Registrant field
> for projects and project groups, set to "unknown" for those registered
> before it was introduced.

I agree that would be useful but is separate and is not urgent.

(Arguably what is really wanted here, for accountability/abuse
prevention, is a log of all actions on the project.)

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

The owner is listed as the maintainer, which is the first field presented in the project information portlet.

Fixed released in launchpad-project 2.2.8.