launchpadblog

Via Planet Launchpad: Launchpad’s Strategist, Jonathan Lange, writes on his blog:

We’re starting to get a picture of what we want to do in the second half of 2010. In particular, lots of people within the team and within Canonical are starting to get fed up with our privacy and permissions model, which is quite patchy. It’s currently tangled up with the way we send emails to people, and we’d love to untangle them.

The Foundations team are already at work making Launchpad faster, and that’s something we want work on even more in the coming months. Derivative distributions – that is, a Linux distribution that extends or customizes another one, generally Ubuntu – have always been a key part of the vision for Launchpad, and they are finally going to get the effort they deserve.

Finally, we want to do whatever we can to make the Ubuntu Software Center rock harder than it does already. Launchpad occupies a special place in the Software Center world, since it can help make it easier to get applications for your desktop and make it easier to develop those applications.

If you’re keen to know what we have planned for Launchpad, you can subscribe to the roadmap page on our dev wiki.

Gavin just landed a very welcome branch to show the number of users affected by a bug on the bug page (bug 494040). You can also sort a list by the number of users affected, and doing this shows that two other popular bugs are related: provide a list of bugs affecting a user (283539) and show the number of affected users in a bug list (271332).

Needless to say, the bugs that affect the most users aren’t always the ones that should be fixed first. But it’s useful data, and more useful now that it’s easily available.

You’ll be able to use this after the release of Launchpad 3.1.12 on Wednesday the 16th December or on Edge right away.

For the last million years¹ or so I’ve been working on a cool new feature for Launchpad Bugs: an inline, AJAXified, asynchronous dupe finder.

For quite some time now people have encountered timeouts or long response times when trying to file bugs, particularly when they enter a long bug summary or the project that they’re filing the bugs on has a lot of bugs through which Launchpad has to search in order to be able to find possible duplicates. The upshot was that whenever a timeout occurred people were unable to file a bug and would have to back up and start again. Needless to say, this was frustrating for all involved.

The new inline dupefinder, which you’ll now find on the “Report a bug” page of any project in Launchpad (when viewed on edge.launchpad.net) is designed to stop this from being a problem, or at least to reduce the problem to a more manageable level and stop it from getting in peoples’ way. It does this in two ways:

1. The inline list of duplicates is much quicker to render than a full Launchpad page.
2. If the search for duplicates times out for some reason you’ll still be able to file a bug.

Here’s the catch: we need your help. Launchpad’s development cycle this month is very short due to the approaching year-end holiday period, so we need to get as much testing done on this as possible. Check out the dupe finder, see if it works for you and, most importantly, report a bug if it doesn’t.

One last thing: at the time of writing, the inline dupe finder only works for projects (like Launchpad Bugs), not for packages or project groups. We’ll hopefully be enabling it for project groups today and with a bit of luck for packages, too. We started off with projects only because it’s the simplest implementation of the concept and it gives us a good base to test from.

Thanks in advance for your help. Let’s make Launchpad awesome together!

¹ This might be an exaggeration.

If you’re using edge, you can now just comment on a question in Launchpad. For all questions on Answers, the “Just Add a Comment” button is now always visible.

Previously, you might have only seen “Add Answer” and “Add Information Request” (or others; the exact buttons vary), both of which add a comment and cause the question status to change. But often, for example, all you want to do is clarify an earlier comment, add some detail, or give a progress update. For that, “Just Add a Comment”.

It’s been put at the rightmost position of all the buttons because we think it should be the least used option. Normally it’s appropriate to use one of the other buttons to move the workflow forward.

The button will land in production with the 3.1.10 release next week.

Over the past few months we’ve been slowly introducing a grand new feature in Launchpad Translations, and with 2.2.7, we are finally ready to announce it to the wide world: message sharing.

Introducing message sharing

Message sharing between different releases of a product or distribution in Launchpad means that translations done in one release (eg. trunk) would immediately apply to translations in another release (eg. stable). This should benefit everyone using Launchpad for translations, one way or another.

• Translators will not have to worry about back-porting translation fixes to older releases anymore, and they can simply translate the latest release: translations will automatically propagate to older releases. Also, this works both ways, so if you are translating a current stable release, newer development release will get those updates too!
• Project maintainers hosting their translations in Launchpad, when they upload a template to a new release series and it gets imported, will instantly get all existing translations from previous releases shared with the new series and translators won’t have to re-do their work. They won’t have to worry about uploading correct versions of translated PO files, and can just care about POT files instead.
• For Ubuntu, there’s another benefit: opening a new release for translations will take minutes instead of days. Message sharing also improves the scalability of the system, and we should soon start seeing more performance improvements as the result of migrating to this new way of managing translations.

How to benefit from message sharing?

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be migrating all existing projects to make the best use of message sharing. If there are any potential problems with existing projects, we’ll be emailing their maintainers and resolving it as we go along. Messages will be shared only between templates in one particular project, and only if they all have the same name. For Ubuntu, they will be shared only between templates in one particular source package, and again, only if they are of the same name.

For example, Ubuntu Jaunty and Ubuntu Karmic already share their messages. If you update a translation for one single string in Karmic GNOME Panel, and that same string exists in Jaunty GNOME Panel, Jaunty translation will be instantly and automatically updated to exactly the same translation.

If you want one particular release to have a different translation from all the other releases, that’s still possible. So, if you do not want a translation in Jaunty to be modified when a translation is changed in Karmic, you have that option too. Since we don’t expect this option to be used often, it’s hidden in the “zoomed in” view on each single message.

What next?

We’ll have to carry out a data migration for each of the projects using Launchpad Translations. Luckily, this migration will be completely transparent, so there’s nothing for anyone else to do. On the outside, nothing will change, until you start doing translations for more than one release series, when they’ll just be better.

New projects will get benefits of message sharing right away, and existing ones should be a bit patient because doing the migration takes some time, but allows to keep the full history of translations intact.

If you are interested to learn more, come talk to us on #launchpad on FreeNode, or join the launchpad-users mailing list.

Launchpad has a little known feature that is getting better. The product release finder is a process that runs everyday to locate new releases and import them to Launchpad. The process uses the series’ Release file pattern to locate files and import them to the appropriate release. It can even create releases for series. The process is robust and worth consideration if you want to upload large release files for your project.

The project owner and series release manager can set the Release URL pattern by the series edit page. The pattern is an ftp, http, or https URL with a glob (*) in the part of the file name that varies with each release for a series. For example:

http://widgets.dom/downloads/widget-2.*

describes all files that start with ‘widget-2.’. This might be the source for two different releases, widget-2.1.tar.gz and widget-2.2.3.tar.gz. The pattern will also match multiple files that belong to a single release, such as widget-2.1.tar.gz, widget-2.1.zip, widget-2.1.changelog.

Many projects choose to group files in series in a directory of their own, in which case the Release URL pattern would look something like:

http://widgets.dom/downloads/2.8/*

You can tell the product release finder to search multiple directories by using a glob for a directory. For example, if your project separates release files in directories for each OS then you can try

http://widgets.dom/downloads/*/widget-2.*

to scan downloads/ubuntu/widget-2.* and downloads/mac/widget-2.*.

Be careful to include the common part of the series in the URL, otherwise files from different series will be imported to the wrong series. Do not do something like:

http://widgets.dom/all-releases/*

because any file that looks like it has version information in it will be imported to one series.

In all cases, the product release finder will extract the version from the file name, and match it to a milestone name. It will create the milestone and release it if necessary. If a version cannot be extracted, the file is ignored.

The version numbers extracted from file names conform to Launchpad URL name rules. So if your release files have underscores or pluses in their version names, dashes will be substituted. Flavour information is also ignored in the file name. For example these file names yield these versions:


emacs-21.10.tar.gz => 21.10
vpnc-0.2-rm+zomb-pre1.tar.gz => 0.2-rm-zomb-pre1
warzone2100-2.0.5_rc1.tar.bz2 => 2.0.5-rc1
furiusisomount-0.8.1.0_de_DE.tar.gz => 0.8.1.0
glow-0.2.1_i386.deb => 0.2.1
Bazaar-1.16.1.win32-py2.5.exe => 1.16.1


What’s Next

The product release finder should notify owners and release managers when there are problems with imports. A lot of problems were fixed recently, but there are two issues we are still seeing in the logs that indicate the Release url pattern must be updated for some projects. The product release finder cannot access the server or directory in some of the URLs. There are also a few URLs that have no glob. They appear to be the URL to a single file, where a glob is needed so that the series can have many releases. If the product release finder does not find your files after a few days, review the Release url pattern and check the remote site to verify they are fine.

We will update the UI to make the Release url pattern more prominent, and easier to set for each series.

You may have noticed that we introduced some useful new options when filing bugs. These are especially useful to anyone who files lots of bugs.

Something for everyone.

Everyone can now set tags when filing a bug. Previously, only people going via the advanced bug filing page would have the option.

One caveat: the tag field is not yet wired up with the magical tag auto-completer that you can use on the bug page itself, but that’s coming.

Something for bug supervisors.

If you’re filing a bug against a project for which you’re a bug supervisor, some additional fields appear in the new Extra options area (which is collapsed by default, but can be expanded by clicking on it). There are options to let you to set the initial status, the importance and the milestone of the bug, and also assign it directly to someone to work on.

If you have any problems with these new features, please file bugs against Launchpad Bugs, or talk to the help contact in #launchpad on freenode.

Up until now, series overview pages have offered a historical overview of a series. Today, we’ve released our new series overview pages that work much more like a dashboard for people driving a series.

Before we look at the new dashboards, let’s clear up some terminology: to clarify the difference between the roles, we’ve changed the name “series driver” to the more familiar term “release manager”. Most projects use series as lines of development that result in one or more releases and so it makes sense to reflect that in the role’s name.

Project drivers remain as they are.

So, back to the new series dashboards: take a look at the page for Drizzle’s trunk series and you’ll see that the page now has a whole load of information that makes it easier to see the current state of that series. Perhaps of most interest is the Milestones and releases section.

At a glance, you can see how much work is planned for the series’ upcoming milestones and the progress being made with those blueprints and bugs.

Further down on the page you get links to the series’ mainline Bazaar branch and details of packages associated with the series.

If you’re a series release manager, let us know what other information you’d find useful on the series dashboards.

New on project overview pages: project timelines.

Here’s the timeline from the Drizzle project. Straight away you can see how many series — i.e. major lines of development — are running concurrently, along with releases and milestones. Click on any of them to get more info.

Greetings, readers!

For a while now I’ve been the Launchpad developer in charge of helping users of other bug trackers migrate their projects to Launchpad. We do this reasonably regularly for users of Trac, SourceForge and Bugzilla, and we’re always open to helping people migrate from other solutions should they wish to.

Several months back, the Elisa project migrated from Trac to Launchpad. In doing so, they wrote a script to take their Trac database and convert it to the Launchpad bug interchange format, which is an XML schema that we use for bug imports (you give us an XML document containing your bugs that conforms to the interchange format schema and we can then import it into Launchpad for you).

More recently, we realised that we were getting quite a few requests from Trac users for help with migration. We went back to the Elisa developers and asked if they’d be willing to let us have their migration tool under the GPL so that we could share it with everyone. They kindly said yes, passed the code to us under GPLv3, and yesterday I made it available on Launchpad as the Trac to Launchpad Migrator project.

It’s a bit rough around the edges at the moment and needs some documentation, but more than anything else it needs people to test it and use it so that we can make migrating from Trac to Launchpad as smooth as possible.

Update: Matthew’s written a blog post about our bug import format.