launchpadblog

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.

Linking Launchpad bugs to upstream bugs can be hard work. You don’t necessarily know whether the bug is reported on the upstream tracker, and if you don’t know where the upstream project tracks its bugs you have to go and find out before you can file the bug and link the Launchpad bug to it.

We understand that this process can be a bit of a pain, so we’re introducing a feature that should make linking to upstream bugs a bit easier: Launchpad will now give you direct links to the bug search and filing forms in a project’s external tracker, so long as Launchpad knows the location of the project’s tracker and, if the tracker tracks more than one project, which project on the external tracker the Launchpad project refers to (so, for example, Launchpad needs to know that the Launchpad project ‘evolution’ links to the ‘Evolution’ product in the Gnome Bugzilla).

And because we know that a project maintainer shouldn’t have to go back to Launchpad and add the link to the remote project when Launchpad should be able to work it out for itself we’ve fixed that problem, too: Launchpad will check all the projects that are linked to a remote bug tracker and will try to deduce which remote project they’re linked to by looking at the bug watches that are registered against that bug tracker. Of course, this isn’t an exact science, and we’ll have to correct some of these auto-generated links manually, but hopefully it won’t take more than a few days for us to straighten out the kinks.

In order to get to remote bug tracker links, all you have to do is click Also affects project on the bug report and select the project that you want to link to. Launchpad will then offer you the links.

We’re going to be working to improve this further in the coming Launchpad development cycle, so keep your eyes on this blog for further information.

A while ago we announced the beta versions of the Launchpad plugins for Trac and Bugzilla. These allow Launchpad to sync not just bug statuses but also comments and, eventually, whole bug reports with the remote bug trackers that have them installed, bi-directionally. The practical upshot of this is that upstream projects that don’t use Launchpad for bug tracking can install one of these plugins and never again have to worry about not seeing bugs that people file using Launchpad but don’t forward upstream.

We in the Launchpad team realise, of course, that Bugzilla and Trac aren’t the only two bug trackers in the world. A project that uses Mantis, for example, may want its bug tracker to interact with Launchpad in the same way that Bugzilla and Trac now can. Unfortunately we can’t develop a plugin for every bug tracker out there as we don’t have the resources or the in-depth knowledge of those trackers’ internals necessary to be able to do so.

To make it possible for anyone to develop a plugin for any bug tracker, we’ve now opened up our Plugin API spec. The spec details all the APIs that need to be implemented for Launchpad to be able to sync bi-directionally with a remote bug tracker. It’s pretty detailed, and we’ve rolled into it our experiences in developing the Bugzilla and Trac plugins so as to make sure that new plugins don’t repeat the issues that we came across when we started interacting with the first bug trackers to install those plugins.

Once you’ve written an API plugin for your bug tracker of choice you can contact us by filing a question against Launchpad Bugs to let us know about it. We’ll then work to write the code on the Launchpad side that will interact with the API you’ve written. Once that’s done we’ll continue to work with you to iron out any bugs that we may come across.

I’m looking forward to seeing your plugins!

A few weeks ago, Matt announced the new Launchpad plugins for Bugzilla and Trac.

The plugins allow bidirectional communication between Launchpad and the remote bug trackers that have them installed. Obviously, we need to test the plugins – and that’s where we need your help.

If you know of any Trac or Bugzilla instances whose administrators might be interested in installing the requisite Launchpad plugin – or indeed if you run such a bug tracker yourself – you can find details on how to install the plugins and what you need to do to get Launchpad to work with your bugtracker on the Launchpad Help wiki:

• For Bugzilla, see http://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/BugzillaPlugin
• For Trac, see http://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/TracPlugin

So, what will installing the plugins do? Well, initially, installing one of the plugins will mean that:

• Launchpad will be able to import comments from upstream bugs which are being watched in Launchpad. If you register a bug watch against an upstream bug you’ll be able to read the conversation about that bug on Launchpad, including the comments that are made on the upstream bug tracker.
• Launchpad will be able to push comments to upstream bugs which are linked to a Launchpad bug, so if you add a comment on Launchpad in reply to a comment which was imported from an upstream bug tracker, the comment will automatically be added to the conversation on the upstream bug tracker, too. This means that users of both Launchpad and the upstream tracker can view the whole conversation about the bug without leaving their preferred environments.

Once we’re happy that the plugins are working correctly we can use them to add some even cooler functionality to Launchpad:

• Launchpad will be able to forward bugs to upstream bug trackers that have the plugin installed. Users of those bug trackers won’t have to check Launchpad for bugs registered against their project; they’ll be forwarded straight to the upstream tracker.
• If a bug watch is created against an upstream bug, Launchpad will tell the upstream bug tracker which Launchpad bug is watching it. This means that not only is there a link in Launchpad to the upstream bug, but there’s also a link in the upstream bug tracker to the Launchpad bug.

The Bugzilla plugin is licensed under the Mozilla Public License and the Trac plugin is licensed under GPLv2.

If you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us by email at feedback@launchpad.net.