A while back I asked for your suggestions for which Launchpad-hosted projects we should feature on the Launchpad front page.
Thanks to everyone who made their suggestions! I’ve now updated the list based on how often each project was recommended and how active they are in Launchpad.
Visit the Launchpad home page to see the new list and, if you have any suggestions for what you’d like to see there, post your comment here.
Between December 13th and 24th we’re holding Launchpad’s first bug jam!
For two weeks, Canonical’s Launchpad team will focus solely on closing bugs and we’d love it if you’d join us.
Right now, there are more than 6,500 open bug reports for the Launchpad project. During the bug jam we want to close as many of these as we possibly can.
Closing a bug doesn’t necessarily mean fixing it: it may be something that can’t be fixed or even that’s already been fixed.
If you want to take part, or track progress, join the launchpad-dev team and mailing list. You should also take a look at the bug jam page of the Launchpad dev wiki.
We are starting to rollout features more rapidly on Launchpad as we move to a continuous deployment model. There are some fixes being deployed today that I want to give Launchpad users a heads up about. These are fixes meant to make the life of a bug supervisor easier.
Nominating to release has in the past been used as a mechanism to request that the bug be fixed, which is not what the feature is for, and we’ve now made it where only the bug supervisor for a project can nominate a bug for a series.
Until now, only project maintainers could make a tag an official bug tag. Now bug supervisors have this ability, too.
Bug supervisors waste time when they have to fix the status of a bug that had been marked fixed but later changed by someone else who mistakenly thinks they have the same bug or has the same problem in an older release. The option to change a fixed bug to another status is now limited to bug supervisors.
There’s even more goodness to come as we get close to daily updates of Launchpad. Stay tuned!
Launchpad’s code hosting will be offline from 11.00 UTC for 15 minutes on Friday the 29th October 2010 for hardware maintenance.
During this time you will be unable to push to or pull from code hosted on Launchpad. Code imports will be paused.
Goes offline: 11.00 UTC 29th October 2010
Expected back by: 11.15 UTC 29th October 2010
I recently sent out an email to Launchpad users who had selected the “expire incomplete bug reports” option for their project, explaining that we would be enabling this feature again in Launchpad. Well, actually, I sent out a lot of emails. This happened partly due to poor design of the script I wrote to send the emails and partly due to my own error. I am sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused anyone. We are taking steps to ensure this sort of poorly executed mass emailing doesn’t happen again on Launchpad.
For those who haven’t heard, the rest of this blog post is meant to fill you in on the coming changes.
Launchpad has always advertised that we auto-expire incomplete bugs matching certain conditions, but we haven’t done this for awhile now. We are ready to turn this feature back on. This means that bugs that are considered inactive will have their status automatically changed from Incomplete to Expired. For more detail on how Launchpad determines if a bug is inactive, visit our Bug Expiry help page.
This change will take effect in about two weeks, sometime during the week of 18 October 2010.
If you maintain a project in Launchpad and you want this feature, you need to ensure that the Expire “Incomplete” bug reports when they become inactive option is selected for your project on it’s Configure bug tracker page. We have disabled it for all projects since it has been selected by default but inactive up until now. Sometime before the week of 18 October, you’ll need to re-enable this option if you want to take advantage of automatic bug expiry.
If you maintain a project in Launchpad and you do not want this feature, you do not have to do anything.
For maintainers of Ubuntu packages in Launchpad, we have left this option enabled. Getting this feature re-enabled was driven largely by requests from Ubuntu developers, so we have not changed the config options for Ubuntu packages in Launchpad.
If you have any other questions about this, feel free to leave a comment here or contact me on Launchpad.
It currently takes an average of two weeks for new changes that have been developed for Launchpad to become live on the Launchpad site.
We’re working on changing this and making the way we deploy Launchpad simpler and more reliable at the same time.
In the first generation of this, we are targeting changes that do not alter the data model, and we’re aiming for a delay of 12-16 hours. Longer term we’ll be aiming for a few hours.
If you are a ‘beta‘ user of Launchpad, this has one primary, and very important change: the ‘edge’ site is going to be removed. We now have a process for validating changes that would previously have been validated on edge using a new staging site. The edge site previously received unvalidated updates and would from time to time have issues as a result. If you are not a ‘beta’ user, then nothing should change for you at all, except that you will notice site changes more often, with no downtime, rather than once a month after downtime.
Sometime in the next few weeks the redirect to ‘edge’ will be removed (it only affected beta users). Instead of a redirect to ‘edge’, the main website will offer you any unreleased functionality, and the ‘disable edge redirect’ link will turn off that functionality for a moderate time period. Following that we will put in place a redirect from ‘edge’ to the normal ‘launchpad.net’ across all of the ‘edge’ servers, and move the servers to the main site server farm.
Over the summer, Jono and I have been compiling a list of all the features in Launchpad.
While the help wiki and the heads of various members of the Launchpad team are a pretty good guide to everything that’s in Launchpad, we haven’t had a canonical, comprehensive, list of Launchpad’s features. Obviously having that one page makes it easier to keep track of what’s there and to think about what Launchpad is and what it isn’t.
So, what do we consider to be a feature? Really, it’s anything where someone can interact with Launchpad or where bugs can live. Simple as that.
If you think something’s missing from this list, or needs more explanation, please do go ahead edit the wiki page.
You’ve probably seen the featured projects list on Launchpad’s home page:
As you can see, there’s a wide variety of projects in that list, and each of them is an excellent example of how Launchpad can help free software projects. However, we’ve had pretty much the same projects in that list for a few months now so perhaps time to give some of the other 19,444 Launchpad projects a slot in the list.
So, it’s over to you: leave a comment here nominating which Launchpad-using project(s) you want to see in the featured projects list. If you have time, let us know why.
Just a quick look at some of the recent posts to Planet Launchpad:
Recently, we changed the way assigning bugs works on Launchpad. It used to be that anyone could assign anyone else to a bug. This was open to abuse as you can imagine. Bug 511269 was filed about the potential problems with this, and we recently changed Launchpad so that only bug supervisors can assign a bug to someone else.
You can still assign a bug to yourself, but this does keep you from assigning someone to a bug to draw their attention to said bug. In the end, this is a good thing, though, as people should only be assigned bugs who are going to be responsible for working on them.
Now there is one issue with this change. Projects that had not established a bug supervisor for the project will find their developers can no longer assign bugs to each other. The easy fix for this is to create a bug supervisor team for your project and have the people working on your bugs assigned to this team. We do realize this might be a bit heavy weight for some projects, so we’ve opened bug 603281 about this issue. A fix for this — only requiring bug supervisor permissions if bug supervisor is defined — should be appearing on Launchpad soon.
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