launchpadblog

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.

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.

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.

Continuing on from our earlier work of sending less but better mail and making it faster to import i18n translation templates: Launchpad will no longer send mail when it successfully imports a template. You can see in the web ui when the template was last imported, and you will still get mail if there’s a problem.

I could hardly put it better than Riddell:

Danilo asked for my reasoning. My reasoning is that pointless e-mails are a pain.

(I hope we’ll eventually have a more structured notification model, that will let you choose to see some notifications by mail and others in the web ui. One step at a time.)

Congratulations and virtual cupcakes to nigelb and chrisjohnston who got their first changes in to Launchpad, and to the reviewers who helped get them finished off and deployed.

jml said it so well at his recent short talk:

I’m not going to kid you, [changing Launchpad is] not easy but it’s sooo worth it, you get to help all these people and you get thunderous applause like I did earlier, and really should have gone to those five guys.

(update: fixed mysteriously-broken video start-at time.)

Launchpad has a web UI, an email interface, and a ReST API that exposes every object in the database.

There are also a bunch of client programs, command line and graphical, that talk to Launchpad to do various things.

What we don’t yet have, and what I think would be great, is a systematic client that lets you manipulate
everything from the command line. There’s some code that starts towards this in Hydrazine, lptools and others, but I think having just a single tool that eventually does everything would be more discoverable and avoid unnecessary fragmentation or duplication.

(That’s not to say there’s not room for others that are guis, that are specialized to particular projects or that encapsulate a lot of policy or opinion about what they’re doing.)

So dobey and I have agreed to gradually merge hydrazine into lptools, and with other people to work towards making lptools cover everything you can do through the web UI or the API. If you have scripts you’ve written yourself, perhaps you’d like to merge them in.

Short story: http://pad.lv/12345 takes you to bug 12345, and pad.lv describes more abbreviations.

Sometimes you’d like to point people to an interesting bug in a project that uses Launchpad, like bug 685380 (that ‘1’ and ‘l’ may need to be more distinct in the new Ubuntu Font).

Typing out https://launchpad.net/bugs/685380 is a bit tedious, and it uses up a fair bit of space in a microblog entry. You can use any of innumerable URL-shortening services, but then the URL’s opaque; which is a shame since it really just wants to represent a 6-digit number.

Therefore: pad.lv (pad love), transparent short URLs for bugs, and other things including projects, people, bug-filing forms, packages, and more.

Maybe someone would like to make bookmarklets that generate these links, or add them into the Launchpad UI?

Thanks to Latvia for letting us use a fraction of their domain name space!

You may start getting “Failed to fetch” error messages when updating your software sources (e.g. through “apt-get update” or “Reload package information” in Synaptic), which may be due to a bug we’ve just cleaned up in Launchpad’s PPAs.

The error looks like this:

  W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu/dists/maverick/Release
  Unable to find expected entry  restricted/binary-i386/Packages in Meta-index file (malformed Release file?)

  E: Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

(more…)

Launchpad will be offline for about 90 minutes while we roll out some changes to the database and to code hosting.

Launchpad API client developers: have your say in bug 714043 on whether launchpadlib should connect by default to Launchpad’s staging server (so data is discarded), or to real Launchpad.