1

Launchpad translations service disruption update

Published by Dan Harrop-Griffiths November 22, 2011 in Notifications

Launchpad translations was due to be unavailable from 10.00 UTC for around one hour this morning to allow us to set up translations for the next Ubuntu release, Precise Pangolin (to be 12.04 LTS).

However, by about 10.15 UTC we encountered problems with data already in Precise’s translations. We weren’t sure how long it’d take to fix this issue, so decided it was better to reschedule the translations downtime for another day.

Sorry for the brief interruption to service. We’ll give you at least 24 hours notice before attempting this work again.


0

Launchpad translations disruption 10.00 UTC 2011-11-22

Published by Matthew Revell November 21, 2011 in Notifications, Translations

Launchpad translations will be unavailable for around one hour, starting 10.00 UTC, on Tuesday 2011-11-22.

During this time Launchpad will not be importing translation files and the web interface for making and reviewing translations will be unavailable. This includes imports for translation uploads, but also imports from Bazaar branches.

We are suspending the service temporarily to allow us to set up translations for the next Ubuntu release, Precise Pangolin (to be 12.04 LTS). Once this is done, imports will resume normally and any backlog should be processed quickly after that.


0

Ubuntu SSO and Launchpad service disruption 10.30 UTC 17th November 2011

Published by Matthew Revell November 14, 2011 in Notifications

Ubuntu’s single sign-on service will be read-only for around 15 minutes starting at 10.30 UTC on the 17th November. At the same time, Launchpad will be offline.

This means that you should be able to log into websites that depend on the Ubuntu single sign-on service, but not make changes to your login or register a new account. It also means that anything involving Launchpad will be unavailable during that time.

Starts: 10.30 UTC 17th November 2011
Expected back by: 10.45 UTC 17th November 2011

We’re sorry for this service disruption. During this time we’ll be making a database upgrade.


3

Improved performance for personal code pages

Published by Raphaël Badin November 10, 2011 in Code, General, Performance

Edit 2011-11-15 08:18 UTC: The problem is now fixed and we’ve re-enabled the new menu.

Edit 2011-11-11 13:42 UTC: We’ve temporarily disabled the new menu while we fix some unfortunate side effect.

We’ve just deployed a new, simplified version of the branch menu displayed on the right hand side of personal code pages (e.g. personal page for the Launchpad team). It looks like this:

Old menu

New menu

Calculating the number of branches took way too much time for people/teams with a huge number of branches (e.g. https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches), up to the point that they were getting timeouts.

The new design, along with optimisations we’ve made to the database queries, should improve performance for everyone.


2

Daily builds of huge trees

Published by Martin Pool in Bazaar, Code, Cool new stuff, General

We’ve just upgraded Launchpad’s builder machines to Bazaar 2.4. Most importantly, this means that recipe builds of very large trees will work reliably, such as the daily builds of the Linaro ARM-optimized gcc. (This was bug 746822 in Launchpad).

We are going to do some further rollouts over the next week to improve supportability of recipe builds, support building non-native packages, handle muiltiarch package dependencies, improve the buildd deployment story etc.


7

Removing a project from a shared bug report

Published by Curtis Hovey November 8, 2011 in API, Bug Tracking, Projects

Launchpad will soon permit you to say your project is not affected by a bug shared with another project — you can delete the spurious bug task. This action can be done from the bug’s web page, and using Launchpad API.

You can remove a project from a bug if you are the project maintainer, bug supervisor, or are the person who added the project to the bug. This action can only be performed when the bug affects more than one project — you cannot delete an entire bug. This feature permits you to undo mistakes.

Launchpad beta testers will see the remove action next to the affected project name in the affects table.

Delete spurious bugs

The delete() method was added to the bug_task entry in the Launchpad API. There is a example API script, delete_bugtasks.py, that can remove a project from many bugs. There is also a split action to create a separate bug just for the specified project to track separate conversations in bug comments.

Usage: delete_bugtasks.py [options] bug_id:project_name [bug_id:project_name]

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose
  -q, --quiet
  -f, --force           Delete or split bug tasks that belong to a public bug
  -d, --delete          Delete a spurious project bug task from a bug
  -s, --split           Split a project bug task from an existing bug so that
                        the issue can be tracked separately
  -w WEBSITE, --website=WEBSITE
                        The URI of Launchpad web site.
                        Default: https://api.launchpad.net;
                        Alternates: https://api.staging.launchpad.net,
                        https://api.qastating.launchpad.net

Previously, you could not remove spurious bug reports about your project. Many were cause by poor bug target management; you could not move a bug between projects and distributions. You can now move bugs between projects and distributions, but thousands of bugs still wrongly claim to affect a project or distribution. This causes clutter on bug pages and searches, and it causes Launchpad performance problems.

This change is a part of a super-feature called Disclosure. To ensure that confidential data is not accidentally disclosed, Launchpad will only permit private bugs to affect a single project. Soon, you may need to remove a project from a bug before marking the bug private.


0

Launchpad offline 08.30-08.45 UTC 10th November, single sign-on read-only

Published by Matthew Revell in Notifications

Launchpad will be entirely offline and Ubuntu’s single sign-on service will be read-only for around 15 minutes from 08.30 UTC on the 10th November.

Goes offline: 08.30 UTC 2011-11-10
Expected back: 08.45 UTC 2011-11-10

This is to allow us to make a database upgrade. We’re sorry for the disruption that this will cause.


5

Welcome to BerliOS projects

Published by Matthew Revell October 10, 2011 in General

It’s sad to read that BerliOS will close in December, after nearly twelve years of serving open source projects. One fewer project hosting site means that the open source world is that bit poorer.

If you’ve been hosting your project on the BerliOS Developer platform and you’re looking for a new home, you’ve got plenty of choice.

We’d love to welcome you to Launchpad and here are a few reasons why you should consider Launchpad:

If you have questions, you’re very welcome to join us in #launchpad on FreeNode and the launchpad-users mailing list.


4

Finding bugs that affect you

Published by Martin Pool October 4, 2011 in Bug Tracking, Coming changes, Cool new stuff, General

We’ve recently deployed two features that make it easier to find bugs that you’re previously said affect you:

1: On your personal bugs page, there’s now an Affecting bugs that shows all these bugs.

2: On a project, distribution or source package bug listing page, there’s now a “Bugs affecting me” filter on the right (for example, bugs affecting you in the Launchpad product).

Counts of the number of affected users already help developers know which bugs are most urgent to fix, both directly and by feeding into Launchpad’s bug heat heuristic. With these changes, the “affects me” feature will also make it easier for you to keep an eye on these bugs, without having to subscribe to all mail from them.

screenshot of "This bug affects me" control


16

Launchpad now accepts mail commands from gmail

Published by Martin Pool October 1, 2011 in Cool new stuff, General

If you use gmail, you should now be able to send commands to Launchpad without gpg-signing.

gmail puts a DKIM cryptographic signature on outgoing mail, which is a cryptographic signature that proves that the mail was sent by gmail and that it was sent by the purported user. We verify the signature on Launchpad and treat that mail as trusted which means, for example, that you can triage bugs over mail or vote on merge proposals. Previously you needed to GPG-sign the mail which is a bit of a hassle for gmail.

(DKIM is signed by the sending domain, not by the user, so it doesn’t inherently prove that the purported sender is the actual one. People could intentionally or unintentionally set up a server that allows intra-domain impersonation, and it’s reported to be easy to misconfigure DKIM signers so that this happens. (Consider a simple SMTP server that accepts, signs and forwards everything from 192.168/16 with no authentication.) However, in cases like gmail we can reasonably assume Google don’t allow one user to impersonate another. We can add other trusted domains on request.)

If you have gmail configured to use some other address as your From address it will still work, as long as you verify both your gmail address and your other address.

You can use email commands to interact with both bugs and code merge proposals. For instance when Launchpad sends you mail about a new bug, you can just reply

  status confirmed
  importance medium

Thanks for letting us know!

We do this using the pydkim library.

Note that you do need at least one leading space before the commands.

If you hit any bugs, let us know.


Previous Entries
Next Entries