launchpadblog

If you are a member of Launchpad’s beta testers team, you’ll now have a slightly different interface for selecting source packages in the Launchpad web interface, and we’d like to know if it goes wrong for you.

One of our longer-standing bugs has been #42298 (“package picker lists unpublished (invalid) packages”).  When selecting a package – for example, when filing a bug against Ubuntu, or if you select “Also affects distribution/package” on a bug – and using the “Choose…” link to pop up a picker widget, the resulting package picker has historically offered all possible source package names (or sometimes all possible source and binary package names) that Launchpad knows about, without much regard for whether they make sense in context.  For example, packages that were removed in Ubuntu 5.10, or packages that only exists in Debian, would be offered in search results, and to make matters worse search results were often ordered alphabetically by name rather than by relevance.  There was some work on this problem back in 2011 or so, but it suffered from performance problems and was never widely enabled.

We’ve now resurrected that work from 2011, fixed the performance problems, and converted all relevant views to use it.  You should now see something like this:

Exact matches on either source or binary package names always come first, and we try to order other matches in a reasonable way as well.  The disclosure triangles alongside each package allow you to check for more details before you make a selection.

Please report any bugs you find with this new feature.  If all goes well, we’ll enable this for all users soon.

Update: as of 2016-09-22, this feature is enabled for all Launchpad users.

Tags: soyuz

This entry was posted by Colin Watson on Tuesday, September 20th, 2016 at 12:37 am and is filed under Beta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.