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Finding the right balance between open access and quality control is an ongoing challenge both for translations groups and the Launchpad Translations developers.

Launchpad already gives projects the flexibility to choose what level of openness versus control that they want for their projects, through different permissions policies. While that allows you to decide who can translate and who should review new translations, until now it hasn’t been particularly easy to introduce new and drive-by translators to your way of doing things.

Now, if you’re in a translation team, you can set a link to an externally hosted translations style guide. Simply go to the translations tab of your team’s page to set the link.

Once set, a link to your style guide will appear on each translation page for which your team is responsible, meaning you have a greater chance of getting suitable strings from new translators.

Welcome to the last of our Twelve days of Launchpad series. For our final spin, we’ll take a look at an open source project that not only forms an important part of Launchpad but that you can also install locally or on your own server: Loggerhead!

Loggerhead gives you a web interface to Bazaar branches, allowing you to:

• browse a branch’s directory structure
• view files
• see diffs for each revision
• search files in the branch
• get the output of bzr annotate — crediting each line of code to its author.

You can use Loggerhead to view any branch in Launchpad by clicking the Source code tab on the branch’s overview page. Let’s see it in action on Drizzle’s trunk.

Have a click around and you’ll see that Loggerhead gives you an easy way to navigate a Bazaar branch and explore its history.

Running Loggerhead locally

That’s only part of the Loggerhead story, though, because you can install it on your own machines. You get everything you see on Loggerhead through Launchpad, as well as the ability to browse through all branches on your machine — rather than one branch at a time — plus the option of a beefed-up search.

Right now, Loggerhead is packaged for Debian and also for Ubuntu (in universe for Jaunty and the ~bzr PPA for other Ubuntu versions).

Once you’ve installed the package — see our guide if you’re new to installing from PPAs — open a terminal, visit a directory where you have some Bazaar branches and enter:

$ serve-branches

Then, visit http://localhost:8080. That’s it: you can now browse around and use Loggerhead as a friendly interface to your Bazaar branches.

Get involved

If you have questions about Loggerhead — or you want to contribute — you can find the project on Launchpad and talk to the Loggerhead team using the Bazaar mailing list.

Welcome to Launchpad’s June 2007 release, milestone 1.1.6!

It has been another month of intense activity here on the Launchpad. Alongside the usual bug fixes and incremental improvements, this release introduces:

• Some bug status names have been improved, with no effect on how are they are used. However, two new bug statuses have been introduced that are available only to a project’s bug contacts. You can find out more on the Bug Statuses help page.
• Teams can now only join other teams with the approval of the first team’s administrator.
• Team members can now renew their own memberships, when their membership is close to expiry if the team is set-up with an on-demand policy.
• Answer contacts will now receive notification of new questions in their preferred languages only.
• Launchpad Translations now displays how many and which of a project’s translations diverge from upstream.
• After nearly three years, the rosetta-users mailing list is closing.
• All Launchpad Translations discussion is now on launchpad-users.
• File Downloads – released in 1.1.5 – allow projects to make tarballs, installers and documentation available for download through Launchpad. Find out more in our File Downloads Overview.
• This blog is now live!

Read the full release notes for details of improvements right across Launchpad.

Keep reading the Launchpad News blog to find out what’s new in Launchpad, who’s using it and how you can make the most of it.