launchpadblog

Last month we made a small change to the series page as a commitment to making a distinction between the driver for a project and the driver of a series. The drivers of a project have the power to make the decision of what features go into a release. But the driver of a series is special. Often a select number of individuals are delegated the awesome responsibility to define the intent of a series, manage all the milestones necessary to meet the goals, and to create the release. Series drivers are release managers.

When developers talk about the trusted persons who are making the release happen, they use the term release manager. While Launchpad recognised the role, it required the person also be a project owner, which is not always suitable for large projects. Release managers do not need the power to edit the project information, they need the power to edit the series information, create milestones, and release them. That is the power they now have.

A project owner can set a user, or a team as the series release manager from the series page. Project drivers also have the power to create a series; they have the power to start planning to be make themselves the release manger of the series they create.

What’s next

Distribution have release managers too, they have the same responsibilities as project release managers, but giving them power is a bit tricky. For distributions other than Ubuntu, release managers will be able to create series and milestones, and edit their details just as a project release manager.

Ubuntu must be handled as an exception; the gift of Soyuz and Translations is also a curse. Many special tasks must be performed before an Ubuntu series can be register a series in Launchpad. The release managers for an Ubuntu series will have more power to edit the series details and milestones.

Launchpad has a little known feature that is getting better. The product release finder is a process that runs everyday to locate new releases and import them to Launchpad. The process uses the series’ Release file pattern to locate files and import them to the appropriate release. It can even create releases for series. The process is robust and worth consideration if you want to upload large release files for your project.

The project owner and series release manager can set the Release URL pattern by the series edit page. The pattern is an ftp, http, or https URL with a glob (*) in the part of the file name that varies with each release for a series. For example:

http://widgets.dom/downloads/widget-2.*

describes all files that start with ‘widget-2.’. This might be the source for two different releases, widget-2.1.tar.gz and widget-2.2.3.tar.gz. The pattern will also match multiple files that belong to a single release, such as widget-2.1.tar.gz, widget-2.1.zip, widget-2.1.changelog.

Many projects choose to group files in series in a directory of their own, in which case the Release URL pattern would look something like:

http://widgets.dom/downloads/2.8/*

You can tell the product release finder to search multiple directories by using a glob for a directory. For example, if your project separates release files in directories for each OS then you can try

http://widgets.dom/downloads/*/widget-2.*

to scan downloads/ubuntu/widget-2.* and downloads/mac/widget-2.*.

Be careful to include the common part of the series in the URL, otherwise files from different series will be imported to the wrong series. Do not do something like:

http://widgets.dom/all-releases/*

because any file that looks like it has version information in it will be imported to one series.

In all cases, the product release finder will extract the version from the file name, and match it to a milestone name. It will create the milestone and release it if necessary. If a version cannot be extracted, the file is ignored.

The version numbers extracted from file names conform to Launchpad URL name rules. So if your release files have underscores or pluses in their version names, dashes will be substituted. Flavour information is also ignored in the file name. For example these file names yield these versions:


emacs-21.10.tar.gz => 21.10
vpnc-0.2-rm+zomb-pre1.tar.gz => 0.2-rm-zomb-pre1
warzone2100-2.0.5_rc1.tar.bz2 => 2.0.5-rc1
furiusisomount-0.8.1.0_de_DE.tar.gz => 0.8.1.0
glow-0.2.1_i386.deb => 0.2.1
Bazaar-1.16.1.win32-py2.5.exe => 1.16.1


What’s Next

The product release finder should notify owners and release managers when there are problems with imports. A lot of problems were fixed recently, but there are two issues we are still seeing in the logs that indicate the Release url pattern must be updated for some projects. The product release finder cannot access the server or directory in some of the URLs. There are also a few URLs that have no glob. They appear to be the URL to a single file, where a glob is needed so that the series can have many releases. If the product release finder does not find your files after a few days, review the Release url pattern and check the remote site to verify they are fine.

We will update the UI to make the Release url pattern more prominent, and easier to set for each series.

Launchpad has supported assigning questions to users for several years, but the privilege was limited to project owners. This meant the feature was rarely used. Since the feature was also not visible, answer contacts often requested that we develop the feature. Question listing now include the assignee column. Answer contacts can assign a question to a user via the edit page. The assigned user will receive a notification about the assigned question. An assigned question will never expire; the assignee is obligated to answer the question.

The launchpad team had considered removing this feature two year ago because it was not popular. There were a few users who explained the need to assign questions to knowledgeable or privileged answer contacts. Simply put, the problem was not that assignment was unwanted, but that it could not be used by the people who needed the feature. The Launchpad team did not really understand how users were trying to use Launchpad until we decided to take turns answering every question asked to the launchpad project. We soon understood the need to assign questions to users. There are many questions that can only be answered by one or two people. The assignment must be visible to everyone, otherwise you would spend an hour reviewing open questions that were already assigned to someone. The cruelest part of assignment that that the assignee was never told that he has a task to complete.

This situation was especially frustrating for me because Answers is the application I started working on when I joined the Launchpad team. I knew that I could fix the issues in a few hours of work. Answers however, is not an application we are developing at the moment, I could not work on it during work hours. So I decided to fix the assignee feature on a Saturday. I could do this because the Launchpad on-call reviewer cannot easily say no to a merge request for a branch. I was also pretty certain my branch would be accepted because the reviewer is also answer contact who has experienced the assignee problems too.

The on-call reviewer rule is in place to ensure every patch is reviewed and given an opportunity to merge. This rule applies to everyone. Some Launchpad users have submitted patches for Launchpad pages and scripts and we have reviewed and merged them. Launchpad is now open source. You too can submit a branch knowing that someone must review it. Many of the Launchpad team members hack on Launchpad on our own time because we love Launchpad. Yet we still cannot fix every bug, or implement every feature. There are a lot of bugs that can be solved in a few hours work. If you want help to close a issue that you care about, we can help. Again the on-call reviewer is obligated try to advise on implementation issues. Also, Launchpad developers prefer to have pre-implementation plans to ensure that when someone decides to start a branch, it can be completed in less than two days and will be accepted by a reviewer. Someone on the #launchpad-dev channel on freenode can help.

Over several months, we have released many small improvements to the project series, milestone, and releases pages to make release planning easier in Launchpad. Well, not all the changes were small. Some were subtly disruptive. Here is an explanation if what happened that I hope will give you ideas of how we can make more improvements.

In November of 2008, Barry Warsaw and myself sprinted with Martin Albisetti to plan the Registry features for Launchpad 3.0. Martin was very insistent that we make series management easier for developers. He proposed a timeline to visualise the past and future of lines of development. You can see the first draft of this feature on the project page now. We are adding it to the series page and the series timeline page (which has always claimed to be a timeline even though it did not present one) for the next release.

I realised during the discussion of how to make the timeline that I did not like the series page, or the milestone and release pages. They looked like historical documents, they were not tools that helped me plan releases.

The immediate problem was that milestones were disconnect from releases, the former must lead to the latter. Even if your project does not use milestones for planning, the information of the milestone is implicit in the release. The release is a device for holding the release notes and the release files, all the other information is the milestone. We made the milestone the primary artefact of the series…milestones may existing long before a release, and not every milestone leads to a release. Creating a release is really an event at the conclusion of the active life of a milestone. We still permit projects to create a release directly from the series page, but you must select the milestone that is being released. If the milestone does not exist, you can create it at that moment. There is no additional work in this process; the milestone fields are the same fields that the release duplicated.

By creating a single page to present the milestone and its release, it became easy to see the planned and achieved work. The page initially shows all the bugs and blueprints targeted for the milestone and you can see the state of each one. When the release is created, the milestone is deactivated (bugs and blueprints cannot be targeted to it any more) and the release note and files are displayed.

The series page now shows the milestone and releases for the series. You can see a summary of all the work targeted to the milestone. You can see which milestones have releases. Developers can see the location of bazaar branch where they can make contributions. Distro packages are listed for distro maintainers and curious users. Adding a milestone to a series is very easy, adding many is easy too.

These pages make my job easier. They are now tools. They could be better though. Martin pressed me into adding the counts of bugs and blueprints in each status for each milestone to the series page. I can see now that they are very useful. I want to add this same summary information to the milestone page. I want to see a burndown chart on the milestone page. A burndown chart is a tool that compares the remaining work in a milestone to an ideal line to meet the milestone estimated release date. I want to know when progress is slow so that I can take action to meet my series’ schedule.

I decided to use the title of “release manager” for the driver assigned to a series. This is a UI improvement. I am a release manager, but I cannot create milestones or releases. Nor can I update these if I want to make a correction. I cannot effectively plan, nor can I create the objective of most of my plans. This sucks. I want to give the release manager the power to accomplish his objectives.

Please give this tools a try. Your feedback is appreciated, as too are your ideas for new features that make release planning easier.

In our 2.2.3 release of Launchpad — due 1st of April — we’re strengthening the relationship between milestones and releases.

Project releases will be explicitly linked to a milestone, meaning the release inherits the milestone’s series and identity information.

You’ll be able to create a new release from a milestone page or, if you don’t yet have a milestone, there’ll be an option to create a release and its parent milestone simultaneously. You can still have milestones that do not correspond to releases.

Just as now, the release will hold the release notes, changelog, date released, and any downloadable files.

What are Releases, Milestones, and Series?

Launchpad hosted projects can arrange their development into Series, which contain Milestones to which bugs can be targeted, and Releases which hold download tarballs and have release notes. Although Milestones and Releases go together, they were previously managed separately in Launchpad. Now they’re more unified.

Why are we doing this?

Many people already use releases and milestones in this way. Milestones aid release planning, and help people understand a project’s goals. Creating a release directly from a milestone implies that the milestone was reached.

Linking milestones to releases improves the data consistency between projects. With good milestone and release information, Launchpad can improve the presentation of series to explain what has happened, and what will happen. We hope that this will make it easier for people to know where and when to make contributions to your project.

This change also allows us to redesign the series, milestone, and release pages. Our goal is to better present the history and future of a project, as well as to improve the workflow for planners.

What you can do

You do not need to take any action regarding releases. We’re migrating existing releases by linking them to a milestone, or if there isn’t an appropriate milestone, creating a new one.

You can use Launchpad’s staging environment — https://staging.launchpad.net/ — right now to check what your releases
and milestones will look like under the new system.

We’d value your feedback so we can improve the data migration script. If you come across a problem, please report a bug here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad

For other comments, send us an email to feedback@launchpad.net

How we’re making the migration

The release’s project, project series, version, code name, and summary come from the milestone it’s linked to. The release’s version will come from the milestone’s name.

When a release and a milestone share the same series and version/name, they are linked. The release’s summary will be appended to the milestone’s summary. You should review your project’s milestones. You can make changes to your project’s milestones and releases on launchpad.net to ensure they are merged correctly on staging.launchpad.net before the final migration.

When no milestone can be matched to a release, a new milestones is created from the release’s information. The milestone is not active, they will only appear on the project’s milestone page. There are a few instances where two series have a release of the same name. Milestone names are unique across a project. So the milestone’s name will contain the release’s version and series name (0.9-series-trunk). You can prevent this from happening by renaming some of your project’s releases on launchpad.net now — in most cases, the duplicate release name is on an obsolete series, or trunk. You can view all your projects series at:

https://launchpad.net/<your-project>/+series

We’re also taking the opportunity to rename a couple of things: description” becomes “summary” and the milestone’s visibility flag (in the REST API) is renamed to “active”.

We believe this change will make releases and milestones much more useful. Please do report bugs or email us if you have any comments.

We in the Launchpad team are changing the way that we triage bugs reported against the Launchpad suite of applications.

The Wishlist importance will no longer be used. Clearly the term is not about importance. It would be nice to convert bugs into blueprints, but the two applications need to achieve feature parity before that can happen. Bugs that describe new behaviours will be tagged as a “feature”. This means that closing the bug requires more than adding missing test coverage and fixing bad logic — the feature needs specification too.

There is a distinction between the Confirmed and Triaged bug status, namely that any user can confirm a bug, but only a project member can state the bug is in the application’s code. Many bugs in the Launchpad suite of applications are implicitly in the Triaged state because the Launchpad team members have set the importance.

Changes to current bugs:

• All bugs that were Wishlist importance are now Low importance and are tagged with “feature”.
• All Confirmed bugs that had a importance of Low, Medium, or High were changed to Triaged.

We want to clarify the meaning of Critical, High, Medium, and Low by expressing their definition in practical terms. Some teams do not think Medium is distinguished from Low, so will not use it. The teams that do use Medium importance will use it to create a pool of bugs for release planning — the bugs may be escalated to High or targeted to a release without a commitment to complete them.

Critical

The bug dramatically impairs users. Users may lose their data. Users cannot complete crucial tasks. The feature is needed to encourage adoption or prevent abandonment of the project.

Synonyms: essential; now, stop everything else; must do
The work is immediately assigned to a engineer. It is his top priority to fix. Team members help the engineer to plan and do the work. The work is released as soon as it is deployable; in the case of a bug, it is released outside of the release schedule.

High

The bug prevents users from completing their tasks. The feature provides new kinds of tasks or new ways of completing tasks.

Synonyms: expected; important; now; can do; should do
The work is assigned to a engineer to be completed in the next 3 releases. The engineer may choose to do other work if he believes it is within the scope of the high priority work.

Medium

The bug is an inconvenience for many users. The feature provides new ways of completing tasks.

Synonyms: preferred; someday; last; try; want to do
The work is not scheduled, though it is intended to be completed. When the work is assigned, it may also be scheduled, but there is no commitment to complete it for the stated release. The engineer may choose to postpone the work in favour of more important work.

Low

The bug is an inconvenience to users, but it does not prevent them from completing their tasks. The feature is a convenience to users.

Synonyms: optional; someday; last; may do
The engineer may assign the work to himself while working on high priority work because the high work provides an opportunity to complete the low priority work at less cost. If the low work in any way jeopardises the high priority work, the low work is unassigned. The engineer is thus certain that the work can be fixed quickly and without difficulty. A corollary to this rule is that low work that is assigned to a engineer must be “in progress” or “fixed” states.

You can read A Practical Guide to Launchpad Bug Triage to learn more about the reasons for these changes.