launchpadblog

When you’re new to a bug report that’s already had quite a bit of activity, it can take a few minutes to get a hang of what’s been happening.

Launchpad gives you a shortcut that lets you quickly see the history of the bug: the bug activity log.

Let’s take a look at a bug I’ve been working on recently: bug 544799. While the main bug page gives you the current description, comment history and details of status changes, you can get a concise yet comprehensive overview of the bug’s history by following the See full activity log link.

So, when you need to get up to speed on a bug report, head for the activity log.

Not sure you need a full blog for your project but still want to announce your news?

Launchpad gives you a no-frills way to make project announcements, complete with an Atom feed.

It’s simple to get started: visit your project overview page and click Make announcement in the right-hand column’s Announcements box. There you’ll also find a link to your project’s announcements Atom feed.

Take a look at Sikuli’s announcements as an example:

Any announcement you make will also show up in the universal Launchpad announcements feed.

As I’ve said before, Launchpad is pretty big. Getting to know everything you can to do in Launchpad can take a while.

Of course, there are the user guide, the tour and the dev wiki even has a feature check-list. It’s still easy to miss things.

So, I’m turning the fifth day of each week into Feature Friday 🙂

I’m gonna kick off with something I use a lot and that, to be honest, is more a Bazaar feature, than a Launchpad feature:

bzr commit -m "Adds email functionality to the client, thereby obeying Zawinski's law." --fixes lp:1234

Adding --fixes lp:1234 to a commit tells Bazaar that the branch contains a fix for bug 1234 tracked in Launchpad.

The next time you push the branch to Launchpad, Launchpad will create a link between the branch and bug 1234.