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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One of our longer-standing bugs has been #42298 (“package picker lists unpublished (invalid) packages”).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.

If you are a member of Launchpad’s beta testers team, you can now try out Git-based recipes.  These work very similarly to the Bazaar-based recipes that Launchpad has supported for a long time, with a few minor changes to handle differences in the underlying version control system: the main thing you’ll probably notice is that you almost always need to explicitly specify a branch name.  The recipes documentation explains what to do; if you’re already familiar with how recipes work for Bazaar, then you should probably skip straight to the recipes guide to look over the differences for Git.

Please try this out and report any bugs you find.  If all goes well, we’ll open this up to all users in a couple of weeks.

Update: as of 2016-03-15, this feature is enabled for all Launchpad users.

If you are a member of Launchpad’s beta testers team, you can now try out webhooks for Bazaar branches and Git repositories. These can be used to set up integration with external sites for various purposes, such as running CI jobs or publishing documentation. We expect to open this up to all Launchpad users soon, but in the meantime please do file a bug against Launchpad itself if you encounter any problems.

See our webhooks documentation for more details.

Update: as of 2015-11-20, this feature is enabled for all Launchpad users.

When you want to assign a bug to someone, subscribe them to a blueprint and so on, you see Launchpad’s person picker. It’s where you search for someone or a team, get a list of possible matches and then select the right one.

Fairly recently, we’ve made a couple of improvements to the person picker, such as adding the person/team’s unique Launchpad ID after their display name, so you stand a better chance of choosing the right person.

The trouble is, how many of us know the Launchpad ID of each person or team we’re likely to deal with?

I know I think more in terms of someone’s IRC nick or the various associations they might have, rather than what they chose as their Launchpad ID.

That’s why we’re changing the person picker: soon, everyone will get a new version of the person picker that shows you what I think is a much more useful set of information in helping find the right person.

Here’s what it might look like:

If you’re in the Launchpad beta testers team you might have seen it already.

If you’ve used it, let us know what you think: does it give you the information you need? Have you come across any bugs to report?

Either email feedback@launchpad.net or comment directly on this post to help us shape the new person picker!

Over the past few months, my team have been working to make it easier to create and manage derivative distributions in Launchpad.

Although most of this will be of interest only to distro admins and contributors, we recently released a beta of a new feature that lets you visualize the differences between Ubuntu’s Oneiric series and Debian Sid.

There’s a new portlet on the distroseries page that will list the numbers of packages in both distributions, numbers only in Sid and numbers only in Oneiric. Clicking on the links takes you to pages that show the differences in more detail and allows you to request debdiffs and add comments on the packages.

Please let me know what you think of this change. We’re tracking bugs using the ‘derivation’ bug tag. Note that this is not meant to be a replacement for MoM – yet. We have a long way to go for that.

Coming soon, actual syncing from Debian to Ubuntu. Watch this space!

Ever wished you got less bug mail? Or perhaps that you could better control the bug mail that Launchpad sends you?

Recently, Gary and the yellow squad, plus before them the previous Launchpad bugs team, have been working to give you just that: better control of the email that Launchpad sends you about bugs.

The yellow squad are spending the next couple of weeks adding some additional polish to the new bug subscriptions and notifications system. If you’re part of the Launchpad beta testers team, though, you’ve got access to it right now.

So, if you are a Launchpad beta tester, here’s what to look out for when dealing with bug subscriptions:

• You can now choose which events will trigger an email and filter them by types of status, importance, etc., when you subscribe to a series, project or distribution.
• As a result, you can have more than one bug subscription to the same series, project or distribution, each subscription with its own name.
• You can mute individual bugs.
• Bug mail that results from a named subscription has a “X-Launchpad-Subscription” header, and a line in the body of the email, quoting the name you gave the subscription.
• You can see, and edit, all the different ways in which you might receive email about a particular bug by clicking “Edit bug mail” on a bug page.

I’ll announce the feature properly, with a nice fancy screencast and all that jazz, when we release it in full.

If you’ve got any questions, come join us on the launchpad-users list. If you come across any bugs, please report them with the “story-better-bug-notification” and “beta-team” tags.

Anyone can join the Launchpad beta testers team and, unlike Hotel California, you can leave at any time.

Photo by Nils Geylen. Licence: CC BY SA 2.0