launchpadblog

As we foreshadowed last October, bug expiry is now active again.

Bugs that are marked Incomplete and that haven’t been touched for 60 days will now start moving to the Expired state. If it turns out the bug’s still useful or valid, anyone can move it back.

We recommend people use the Incomplete state to mean: if this bug report doesn’t get more information, there’s nothing we can do with it.

This only affects projects expire incomplete bug reports setting turned on in the Configure bug tracker page.

Launchpad has a REST API that exposes almost every object within Launchpad. Most of them have API URLs that closely match the human-readable URL: for instance, https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/316694 can also be obtained in machine-oriented JSON or XML form from http://api.launchpad.net/1.0/bugs/316694. (The “1.0” in that URL means this is in the 1.0 API namespace.)

Previously, many Launchpadlib clients used string transformation to get from the API URL to something they could show a human in a web browser.

We’ve just added a web_link property on all Launchpad objects, so client applications can (and should) now just use that instead. Because this is just sent in the object representation you don’t need to upgrade launchpadlib to see it.

Due to a hardware failure, bazaar.launchpad.net is offline at the moment. We expect it will be back up and working correctly in about an hour or two from now. (That is, by about 17:00 UTC on the 21st of January.)

This affects all bzr-branch-related services: ssh and http access to branches, and also browsing of branches.

If you saw an “incorrect data check” error or similar from bzr while branching from Launchpad, this is probably the reason why, and the problem should be fixed soon.

Update: Code hosting is now back online. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

Three tips from Leonard’s lightning talk in Prague about writing faster Launchpadlib API clients:

1. Use the latest launchpadlib. It gets faster from one release to the next. (The versions in the current Ubuntu release should be fine; otherwise run from the branch or the latest tarball.)

2. Profile:

    import httplib2
    httplib2.debuglevel = 1

will show each http request and response, so that you can see what’s taking time.

3. Fetch objects only once:

Don’t do this:

    if bug.person is not None:
        print bug.person.name

instead

    p = bug.person
    if p is not None:
        print p.name

In the first case, the client may fetch the Person object twice. (We may fix this in future.)