This status report was put off until today because the edge site was frozen. This update is huge. We’ve made one change to launchpadlib, exposed a whole lot of Launchpad’s project registry, and published branches for the first time.
Since the development cycle is over, the next update will probably be in two weeks.
Something I love about Launchpad is that I can quickly get a feeling for the people whose work I come across. Some of what you see on a Launchpad profile page is more geared towards knowing the person than their work.
We’ve added a bit more to that “getting to know you” part of the profile page with our new Google Maps mash-up. Now you’ve got the option of showing other people where in the world you are by flagging your location.
This is pretty cool for a bit of fun but when it comes to organising team meetings – in person or online – it becomes really useful. Take a look at the profile page for the Launchpad Developers team. On our team map you get a quick-glance feeling for where in the world members of the Launchpad team are.
Visit your profile page to set your location.
The guys in the Launchpad-Bazaar integration team added code review to Launchpad earlier this year.
Now, when you take part in a code review it’ll count towards your Launchpad karma!
If you’re new to code review, take a look at my previous post.
Last week the Launchpad web service didn’t change, because the source tree was frozen pending a Launchpad release. But this week we landed the branches we wrote last week, as well as some new ones.
The biggest change this week is client-side caching. Update your copy of launchpadlib to revision 17 and change your scripts to pass a directory name into the Launchpad constructor. That directory will be used as a cache.
>>> cachedir = "/home/me/.launchpadlib/cache/"
>>> launchpad = Launchpad(credentials, STAGING_SERVICE_ROOT, cachedir)
Without the cache, it takes several seconds just to start up launchpadlib. Every time you create a Launchpad object, the library has to download information about how Launchpad
works. With the cache in place, launchpadlib will download that information once and reuse it for every Launchpad object you create. The cache will also store the bugs, people, and other objects you retrieve as you use launchpadlib. The more often you use the same Launchpad objects, the more time the cache will save you. When we change Launchpad, launchpadlib will notice and will download the documents that have changed.
Second, Edwin Grubbs continued his work on publishing the Launchpad registry. launchpad.projects is now open for business. You can get basic information about Launchpad projects, their milestones and branches.
>>> bzr = launchpad.projects['bzr']
>>> bzr.title
u'Bazaar Version Control System'
>>> bzr.programming_language
u'Python'
>>> [milestone.name for milestone in bzr.all_milestones]
[u'0.9a', u'1.3.1rc1', u'1.4rc2', u'1.5', u'1.6', ...]
Finally, I’ve given launchpadlib some code that uses the client-side cache to avoid the “lost update problem.” This happens when two people modify the same object without coordinating, and the second one unknowingly overwrites the first person’s changes. If you use launchpadlib to make a change and it turns out someone else has changed the same object, you’ll get a chance to look at the new version of the object and see if your changes are still relevant.
One thing we haven’t done yet is gotten the API HTML reference to be regenerated whenever we change the web service. I planned to work on this yesterday, but instead spent the day fixing bugs. I’m working on it now and we should have it up early next week.
Next week we’ll see also more of the Launchpad registry exposed, and some long-awaited aspects of Launchpad’s bug tracker. And on Tuesday, Barry Warsaw and I will be talking about Launchpad’s web service API as part of Ubuntu Developer Week. That’s at 1900 UTC, in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net.
A few weeks ago, Matt announced the new Launchpad plugins for Bugzilla and Trac.
The plugins allow bidirectional communication between Launchpad and the remote bug trackers that have them installed. Obviously, we need to test the plugins – and that’s where we need your help.
If you know of any Trac or Bugzilla instances whose administrators might be interested in installing the requisite Launchpad plugin – or indeed if you run such a bug tracker yourself – you can find details on how to install the plugins and what you need to do to get Launchpad to work with your bugtracker on the Launchpad Help wiki:
So, what will installing the plugins do? Well, initially, installing one of the plugins will mean that:
Once we’re happy that the plugins are working correctly we can use them to add some even cooler functionality to Launchpad:
The Bugzilla plugin is licensed under the Mozilla Public License and the Trac plugin is licensed under GPLv2.
If you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us by email at feedback@launchpad.net.
While in some parts they take their pay in Warcraft gold, round here we’re karma fiends!
To feed the habit, Tim in Launchpad’s Code Hosting team has provided another way of earning karma: making commits to any Bazaar branch that’s registered to a project in Launchpad.
We’re backdating the karma for commits but, as with all karma the older the action is the less it’ll count towards your karma score; really old actions don’t count at all. Also, +junk branches don’t count towards karma at all.
Now that the Launchpad web service API has entered beta, I’ll be posting an update every week about the improvements we make to it. This way you’ll always know what’s going on, and you’ll see when something you want to do becomes possible.
Web service improvements
This week I made one major change to the web service itself. There’s now a special top-level resource that’s an alias to “you” on Launchpad. This is a nice convenience when you’re writing scripts for yourself, but it’s practically essential if other people are going to be running your program.
Here’s how to get a reference to the person who’s running the script, using launchpadlib, our Python interface to the web service.
>>> me = launchpad.me
>>> print me.name
leonardr
If you’re not using launchpadlib, GET the service root at https://api.staging.launchpad.net/beta/, and you’ll see the URL to this resource as ‘me_link’. When you GET that URL you’ll be redirected to your own user account.
launchpadlib improvements
I spent most of my time working on launchpadlib. Apart from some bugfixes and performance improvements that you won’t even notice, I made three big improvements.
Introspection
Previously, to see what capabilities a launchpadlib object had, you had to check the reference documentation. (That documentation is two weeks out of date, by the way; we’ll be fixing that next week.) Now you can just call dir() on an object, and all of its Launchpad-derived attributes and methods will show up in the list. If you only want to see the Launchpad attributes or methods and not all the internal launchpadlib stuff, you can check lp_attributes or lp_operations. This code shows what you can do with a launchpadlib person object:
>>> me.lp_attributes
['self_link', 'resource_type_link', 'longitude', ... 'homepage_content']
>>> me.lp_operations
['addMember', ... 'setLocation']
Slices
The second new feature is the ability to slice Launchpad collections as though they were Python lists. Here’s some code that gets the 10 most recently filed bugs in Launchpad.
>>> recent_bugs = launchpad.bugs[:10]
>>> [bug.id for bug in recent_bugs]
[258042, 258041, 258040, 258039, 258038, 258037, 258036, 258033, 258032, 258030]
Previously, the only way to do this was to iterate over launchpad.bugs and insert a break statement when you’d had enough, which was very awkward.
Loading from bookmarks
The third new feature is the ability to bookmark launchpadlib objects and go back to them later, the way you can bookmark web pages in your browser. Here’s launchpadlib code to acquire a bug.
>>> a_bug = launchpad.bugs[251497]
>>> print a_bug.title
Make it possible to instantiate a resource from a URL
I can play around with that bug all I want within a Python session, but if I exit the Python session the bug will disappear. If I want to get the bug back later, I’ll need to find it again from scratch. Unless I store the bug’s unique ID (also known as its URL).
>>> print str(a_bug)
https://api.staging.launchpad.net/beta/bugs/251497
At this point I can write that string to a file or database. Later on, a different process might come online and load the string back into memory. That process can get the bug object back by passing the bug’s URL into launchpad.load().
>>> a_bug = launchpad.load("https://api.staging.launchpad.net/beta/bugs/251497")
>>> print a_bug.title
Make it possible to instantiate a resource from a URL
Pretty simple stuff–people have been saving URLs and passing them around to each other for over fifteen years. The advantage of our web service’s design is that it gives you the same power in a scripted environment.
Upcoming work
Next week I plan to spend most of my time on behind-the-scenes performance improvements. You won’t notice anything if you use launchpadlib. If you’re writing your own client, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say “ETag support.”
Meanwhile, Edwin Grubbs will be working to expose Launchpad’s project registry through the web service.
See you next week!
If you’ve been wanting to integrate Launchpad into your development tools, or create scripts that read and write Launchpad’s dataset, your wait is over. We’ve released the initial version of our RESTful web service API to the beta testing team. Now you can integrate with Launchpad using our Python library or by making simple HTTP requests.
No longer will you need to screen-scrape or write scripts that pretend to be a web browser; your programs will be able to communicate directly with Launchpad. Our support for OAuth means your users can delegate a subset of their Launchpad privileges to your program or website, without handing over their Launchpad pasword.
Right now, the web service provides basic access to Launchpad’s people and bugs. We’re working now to expose more of Launchpad’s data–projects, milestones, and so on–and to improve the usability of the Python client. Once we’ve stabilized the framework, we’ll open up the web service API to everyone. In the meantime, you can try it out by joining the Launchpad Beta Testers team. Once you’re on the team, you can get started by visiting the help homepage.
Our Python library, launchpadlib, works as a “web service browser”. You can use it to navigate the web service from a Python script, the way you surf the Launchpad website from your web browser. You don’t need any special knowledge of web services to use launchpadlib; you can write natural-looking code like this:
>>> me = launchpad.people['my-username']
>>> me.display_name = 'My new display name'
>>> me.lp_save()
We’ll be improving launchpadlib and the web service simultaneously; this is just the beginning.
With the release of Launchpad 2.0, we’ve introduced a new, simpler, design and navigation.
Over the past couple of weeks, you may already have seen that we’ve made some changes to Launchpad’s web interface. For a start, there’s our fabulous new logo (designed by Eugene Tretyak) and new silver header bar.
The changes that we think are likely to have most effect on how you use Launchpad are:
If you come across a bug in the new web interface, please report it. If you have any other feedback, we’d love to hear from you.
You may have spotted, on the Launchpad front page, a new summary of what Launchpad’s all about:
“Launchpad is hosting service for open source projects that’s big on collaboration.”
One of the earliest manifestations of our approach to collaboration was Launchpad’s ability to track the status of the same bug as it affects different projects. For example, a bug discovered in the Silva CMS may actually be a bug in the Zope 3 web application framework.
Because both Silva and Zope 3 use Launchpad to track their bugs, Launchpad treats that shared bug report as a single entity with the same bug number and a shared comment history. The bug report turns into a cross-project effort to find a fix for everyone, while both Silva and Zope 3 keep track of how the bug affects their projects through separate statuses, assignees and so on.
Now, if that same bug also affects a project that tracks its bugs outside Launchpad – say, in Sourceforge or the Debian BTS – then it’s harder to share a comment history. Instead, Launchpad links to the bug report in the external tracker and imports it status. If the bug gets fixed by the other project, everyone working on it in Launchpad can see straight away.
However, we’re committed to the idea that a shared comment history in effect creates an ad-hoc, cross-project, team to fix the bug. A project’s choice of bug tracker – in so far as is possible – shouldn’t prevent them from taking part in that conversation.
That’s why we’re about to launch a beta test of two new GPL plugins that make it easier for Launchpad to interact with Bugzilla and with Trac. Once they’re released, the plugins will enable Bugzilla and Trac instances to share bug comment histories with Launchpad.
We’re on the look-out for people to help us test the plugins. If you’re interested, drop us a mail.
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