launchpadblog

Yesterday, our new design has started to roll out on the edge servers. This will be an incremental and iterative process, as all the pieces come together, where our best ideas and speculations meet production data.
One of the conversations we had when re-designing the Launchpad UI, was that projects should be more on the foreground. They are what make Launchpad great, and the more projects that use it, the more powerful the tool gets. While breadcrumbs are still being worked on (they will look more like breadcrumbs and be more detailed), project pages now highlights the project’s logo and name:

New changes being rolled out on a daily basis. Exciting times!

Now that we’ve released Launchpad’s source code, our next couple of months of work are going to be mostly focused on our page layouts.
Launchpad has been around for quite a few years now, and tight release schedules packed with ever-changing features have had the side effect of us ending up with a lot of pages with different layouts.
In the next 2 months, we plan to fix that, and make sure every single page in Launchpad (452 templates!) has our new “3.0 look n’ feel”.
What does that look like, you may ask yourself?

Well, we’re still working on it, as we’re going to change the UI for the navigation (as well as tweak it’s functionality a bit, more on navigation in a future post). We do have rough draft which we’re starting to work towards, figure out what works and what doesn’t with real data, things we didn’t think about, etc.

The first major page we’re converting is the project overview page, currently being worked on by the world famous Curtis Hovey, and the initial draft should look similar to this:

It’s important to note we’re still working on the UI, so the image above is our starting point rather than the end product.

Since it will take some time to make all the changes, we’re most likely not going to make a Launchpad release in August, and jump straight to September. Roll-outs to our edge server will continue to happen daily, and we’ll need your feedback on the changes more than ever. If you’re interested in helping us, just join the beta testers team.

Exciting times! 

After many months on working on the necessary infrastructure to deploy complex AJAX widgets in Launchpad, more user interface reviews than any developer would like to go through in a life time, and a lot of cursing, the tip of the iceberg is finally showing.

Mark announced months ago the level of complexity we where aiming at achieving, and this last roll out of Launchpad actually places us very close to that.

Micheal Nelson did some amazing work, and landed the first of many pop-up widgets, allowing you to mark a bug as a duplicate without needing to refresh the page:

You will start to see that some links in Launchpad are green, those will mean that you will get an AJAX experience instead of going to another page. Check it out in bugs:

Tom Berger and Abel Adeuring also switched to javascript ninja-mode, and cooked up a slick UI for managing official bug tags:

In our 2.2.3 release of Launchpad — due 1st of April — we’re strengthening the relationship between milestones and releases.

Project releases will be explicitly linked to a milestone, meaning the release inherits the milestone’s series and identity information.

You’ll be able to create a new release from a milestone page or, if you don’t yet have a milestone, there’ll be an option to create a release and its parent milestone simultaneously. You can still have milestones that do not correspond to releases.

Just as now, the release will hold the release notes, changelog, date released, and any downloadable files.

What are Releases, Milestones, and Series?

Launchpad hosted projects can arrange their development into Series, which contain Milestones to which bugs can be targeted, and Releases which hold download tarballs and have release notes. Although Milestones and Releases go together, they were previously managed separately in Launchpad. Now they’re more unified.

Why are we doing this?

Many people already use releases and milestones in this way. Milestones aid release planning, and help people understand a project’s goals. Creating a release directly from a milestone implies that the milestone was reached.

Linking milestones to releases improves the data consistency between projects. With good milestone and release information, Launchpad can improve the presentation of series to explain what has happened, and what will happen. We hope that this will make it easier for people to know where and when to make contributions to your project.

This change also allows us to redesign the series, milestone, and release pages. Our goal is to better present the history and future of a project, as well as to improve the workflow for planners.

What you can do

You do not need to take any action regarding releases. We’re migrating existing releases by linking them to a milestone, or if there isn’t an appropriate milestone, creating a new one.

You can use Launchpad’s staging environment — https://staging.launchpad.net/ — right now to check what your releases
and milestones will look like under the new system.

We’d value your feedback so we can improve the data migration script. If you come across a problem, please report a bug here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad

For other comments, send us an email to feedback@launchpad.net

How we’re making the migration

The release’s project, project series, version, code name, and summary come from the milestone it’s linked to. The release’s version will come from the milestone’s name.

When a release and a milestone share the same series and version/name, they are linked. The release’s summary will be appended to the milestone’s summary. You should review your project’s milestones. You can make changes to your project’s milestones and releases on launchpad.net to ensure they are merged correctly on staging.launchpad.net before the final migration.

When no milestone can be matched to a release, a new milestones is created from the release’s information. The milestone is not active, they will only appear on the project’s milestone page. There are a few instances where two series have a release of the same name. Milestone names are unique across a project. So the milestone’s name will contain the release’s version and series name (0.9-series-trunk). You can prevent this from happening by renaming some of your project’s releases on launchpad.net now — in most cases, the duplicate release name is on an obsolete series, or trunk. You can view all your projects series at:

https://launchpad.net/<your-project>/+series

We’re also taking the opportunity to rename a couple of things: description” becomes “summary” and the milestone’s visibility flag (in the REST API) is renamed to “active”.

We believe this change will make releases and milestones much more useful. Please do report bugs or email us if you have any comments.

A few days ago a fix for bug #286359 landed: provide translation import notifications to Ubuntu packagers. This means that all packagers will start getting emails about translation files (basically, *.pot and *.po files) from their packages as soon as they are imported (or the import fails).

This should help packagers detect and fix l10n-related problems more easily, since they’ll have most of the debugging information they need right inside their inboxes. If you want to filter these emails, look for a sender of rosetta@launchpad.net.

The grey area of where to send notifications for automatically synced package uploads from Debian remains. I am planning on solving that with a public mailing list where anyone interested can go in and check for problems, and also fix them if they want to. Alternative is to rely on the recent improvement by Jeroen which keeps any failure messages inside the import queue itself, and simply drop all of these messages altogether.

After a few months of working on all the infrastructure changes needed to start deploying AJAX on Launchpad, we are now ready to start developing the mockups we’ve been working on for the past months in the User Experience team.
To make sure we coordinated the work of 35 distributed developers, and really get the ball rolling 10 of us gathered for a sprint in Berlin and went into full ninja-hacking mode for a week, while defining standards and best practices as we went along.
The outcome of the sprint has been amazing (it’s actually still going on!), and we’re very well prepared to roll out all kind of AJAX goodies like “in-line status editing”, “multi-line editing” and “person pickers” in the next few months. It’s going to be awesome 
We have decided on YUI3 as our javascript library, and while it is still not a final version, we are very happy with our decision and it has allowed us to do some really cutting edge work, while maintaining clean and re-usable code.

I’m also very excited about in-line text editing having landed last week in Launchpad’s edge version (used by beta testers), enabling in-line editing of bug titles and project names, which landed thanks to the amazing work of Māris Fogels and Francis Lacoste. For all you non-beta testers, you will see it rolled out late next week.

Since it got rolled out, every time I edit a bug title I get the greatest feeling when presented with this:

A lot more coming soon, so stay tuned!

Hi,

As you hopefully have learned from various sources (blog posts, launchpad-users mailing list, Launchpad Announcement list, Launchpad podcast, beta testing on Staging and Edge, etc) Launchpad’s user interface has been updated based on input from our usability study conducted at UDS Boston and also existing UI bug reports. We plan to deploy these updates this week into production assuming no major issues are uncovered. With this in mind, I’m asking everyone who is willing to please help us test these changes.

If you want to play around with the new UI in our sandbox, head over to https://staging.launchpad.net. Changes here will not affect production.

If you want to use Launchpad with the new UI, head over to https://edge.launchpad.net. Changes here will affect production.

Please report all UI related bugs you find at https://launchpad.net/launchpad-project/+filebug. We will be committing UI updates daily to Staging and Edge until Wednesday and then polishing updates over the next few weeks to address any priority issues that might be uncovered.

UI changes are always rather disruptive and we thank you for your patience and understanding as we make this transition. We hope you will be pleased by the end result.

Thank you!

Joey Stanford

Welcome to the Coming Changes report for Launchpad 1.1.10 (which is due for release 24th October).

Here you can find information on changes that we’re planning for the next Launchpad release. These are changes that may affect the way you use Launchpad, rather than a full list of new features that will appear in 1.1.10.

Giving us your feedback

We welcome your feedback and invite you to join us on the launchpad-users mailing list.

You can also come and speak directly with the Launchpad team in the Launchpad Users Meeting on Wednesday 10th October at 16.00 UTC.

We’ll publish an updated version of this report on the 17th October.

Launchpad general

• A new “Request information” option will be added to the “Proposed member” page, alongside “Approve” and “Decline”. This will help team administrators to contact prospective members who hide their email addresses. (Bug 66105)
• When someone registers a new project in Launchpad, they will need to specify that project’s licence. (Bug 117276)
• Team membership change notifications will have shorter subject lines. (Bug 144540)

Bug Tracker

• It will be possible to change the status of multiple bugs at once from a bug listing. (Blueprint mass-bug-editing-phase-1 and bug 41702)
• Displaying remote bug comments. (Blueprint displaying-remote-bug-comments)
• Email addresses in bug descriptions will be obfuscated. (Bug 140575)

Code

• The code browse (Loggerhead) pages will have an improved design. (Bug 144744)
• The “user@” portion of ssh code-hosting URLs will be removed and the user identified by their public key. (Bug 137910)
• Editing bug-branch links will be restricted to the branch owner and the project’s bug contact. (Bug 138805)

Soyuz

• Ubuntu releases that are no longer support (Warty, Hoary and Breezy) will be removed from Launchpad’s archive. (Bug 66631)

Further information

You can find full details of what we have planned for Launchpad 1.1.10 at:

https://edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-project/+milestone/1.1.10

The next release of Launchpad is due on the 19th September. As always there’ll be new features, bug fixes and one or two changes to the way some parts of Launchpad work.

I’ll post full details of what’s new on the release day. For now, here are the changes that may affect the way you use Launchpad:

General Launchpad

• Bug 127879: Python examples will no longer be misinterpreted as
  quotes and so won’t be collapsed as quotes.
• Bug 129815: Milestone overview pages will show the total number of bugs and blueprints targeted.

Answers

• Bug 129497: Questions will no longer be automatically expired if they are linked to an open bug.
• Bug 3970: It will be possible to turn a bug report into a question.

Code

• Bug 74031: Mirror branch pages will display the mirroring interval and the time of the next planned mirroring.
• Bug 130883: Imports of Subversion trunks that use a name other than “trunk” will be possible.
• Bug 133983: On the branch home page, the revision number shown in the “Recent revisions” list will be hyperlinked to codebrowse and will show the diff for that revision.
• Bug 133599: The URLs that are shown on the branch index page will show the Bazaar smart server URLs rather than SFTP.
• Bug 43808: It will be possible to make a bug-branch link from the branch page.

Bug tracker

• Bug 4592: If you add a watch of a bug in an external tracker that Launchpad doesn’t already know about, it’s now much easier to give Launchpad the details of that new bug tracker.
• Bug 91925: Unassigned bugs that have the “Incomplete” status for 60 days will automatically be switched to “Invalid” status to help provide cleaner bug search results.
• Bug 126224: Removing an attachment from a bug will also remove the associated comment.

You can go find more about what we have planned on the Launchpad 1.1.9 milestone page.

There’s a lot to Launchpad. Right now, we’ve got: five main applications, 3,397 registered projects, 1172 teams, a staggering 1,121,443 people registered and a heck of a lot of code.

Milestones

To make it easier to manage Launchpad’s development, we release a new version roughly every four weeks. The next release we’re due to make is milestone 1.1.7 on 18 July. Then 1.1.8 comes on 22 August.

You can see what blueprints and bugs are targeted against each part of Launchpad by visiting the milestone links on the Launchpad project overview page.

There’s an easier way, though…

Quick overview of coming features

If you’re not interested in every detail and want to know about only the most interesting or important features, you can take a look at our Coming Features page.

It’s split into each of the main Launchpad applications – Bug Tracker, Code Hosting, Blueprint, Answers and Translations – and gives you a brief overview of what we’ve got planned for the next couple of months

Talk to me

The great thing about the Coming Features page is it’s an easy way to see what changes might affect you. So, let’s take an example:

Frequently asked questions occur in every project. A new feature in the Answer Tracker will help users to find the best answer to a project’s most commonly asked questions. Answer contacts will be able to identify FAQ and provide the canonical answer, meaning that users can get straight to the information they need. FAQ will be searchable in their own right and will also be offered as a possible answer when a user asks a matching question.

If you’re an Answer Contact, the new FAQ feature could have quite an effect on the way you work. If you had concerns or questions, you get to voice them long before the feature is released and in time to have an impact on its implementation.

So, take a look at the Coming Features page, subscribe to it and then email me – feedback@launchpad.net – with you comments, questions and suggestions!

Update: I’ve added a feed for Coming Features at http://news.launchpad.net/category/coming-features/feed