launchpadblog

Since we introduced PPAs, we’ve had a number of requests for signed packages in archives. Up until now, when installing a package from a PPA Ubuntu has warned that it is unsigned.

So, if you want to sign packages in a PPA, what do you sign them with? We dismissed two of the most obvious ideas:

• signing with the author’s own key, as that’d mean either Launchpad storing their private key or doing away with the build part of PPAs and asking authors to upload binaries
• signing with one key for all PPAs, which is a bit meaningless.

Instead, starting this week we’re generating a unique key for each archive and then signing each build made from the time of the key’s creation. As someone downloading from a PPA, you can easily check the fingerprint on its overview page in Launchpad to ensure you’re getting what you expect.

It’ll take a while to generate all the keys; check your PPA overview page to see if your key is ready yet. In the mean time, some PPAs will have keys and others will continue to generate warnings about unsigned packages.

We’ll post more details in the new year.

You can now follow Launchpad news and other updates through Twitter and identi.ca!

For news and status updates, take a look at:

• twitter.com/launchpad_net
• identi.ca/launchpad

Brad‘s also running an experiment using TwitterFeed to give us:

• twitter.com/launchpadbugs
• identi.ca/launchpadbugs

TwitterFeeds takes the Atom feed of all bug reported against the Launchpad project and turns it into a stream of microblog posts.

Putting your project’s bugs into identi.ca or Twitter

If you track your project’s bugs in Launchpad, you can also turn them into an indeti.ca or Twitter stream. Similarly, you can create a stream of your project’s code branches, latest revisions or announcements!

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1: Create an identi.ca or Twitter account — something like yourprojectbugs.

Step 2: Visit your project’s overview page in Launchpad and copy the relevant Atom feed URL.

Step 3: Log into TwitterFeed using your OpenID.

Step 4: Give TwitterFeed the Atom feed and your identi.ca or Twitter account details.

And you’re done!

Let us know how you find our first steps in microblogging Launchpad.

Update: The instructions above now cover using TwitterFeed with laconi.ca based services, such as identi.ca. It’s also worth noting that TwitterFeed supports a maximum of five updates every 30 mins so this may not be ideal if you want to ensure you get comprehensive coverage.

Need to contact someone who’s hidden their email address in Launchpad?

No problem. Launchpad profile pages now give you a way to contact that person without having to know their email address.

Over to Barry Warsaw — who worked on the feature — for more:

You can now contact up to three other Launchpad users per day, even if those users have hidden their email addresses. The recipient’s privacy is preserved (unless they respond) and you can choose which of your valid email addresses the contact message will come from.

So now you can get in touch with all prospective new team members, bug commenters, branch owners and so on.

Try it out on your own profile page.

At our recent get-together in London, we in the Launchpad team discovered a sure-fire way to turn heads: t-shirts emblazoned with the stylish new Launchpad logo.

Naturally, we want to share this milestone in sartorial expression with everyone who loves Launchpad. So, you can now buy your own Launchpad t-shirt from the Canonical store (women’s and men’s versions available).

We’re also giving one away in our competition. To enter, answer this question correctly:

What’s the average (mean) number of people per team in Launchpad?

Send your answer and UK t-shirt size (S, M, L, XL or XXL for men, XS, S, M, L or XL for women) to feedback@launchpad.net, with the subject line “T-shirt competition”, before Friday 12th December. The Launchpad team will select the winner from the correct answers.

The Launchpad team’s decision is final and we’ll need the winner’s postal address to send the t-shirt.

Good luck 🙂

Update: As more people join and register projects in Launchpad, the correct answer may vary a little.

What do you get when you bring together a group of developers, QA engineers and other Launchpad team members? Cheesy photos, of course!

Photo: Graham Binns

We’ve come by air and by land to meet in London for a couple of weeks at what we’re calling the Launchpad EPIC. It’s a rare chance to get the full Launchpad team together for planning, training and, of course, unrepentantly bad dancing.

It also means we’re in town at the same time as the London Ubuntu 8.10 release party. If you’re planning to be there, come say “hello”.

The Launchpad team is excited to announce the October 16th 2008 release of Launchpad 2.1.10!

There’s great news if you use Launchpad to host Bazaar branches, plus there’s the usual smaller new features and bug fixes.

Slashing branch upload times

From now on, you may notice that uploading a branch to Launchpad is significantly quicker. With this release, we’ve introduced support for Bazaar’s new stacked branches feature.

Over to Launchpad Code developer, Jono Lange, for details:

Stacked branches work just like normal branches but hold only the history that differentiates them from the project’s mainline.

So, if you upload a branch to a project that already has its trunk branch in Launchpad, you’re uploading only the differences between your work and the trunk.

Stacked branches mean that uploading a large project’s code to Launchpad can now take just a couple of minutes. To use them, you need to upgrade your branches to Bazaar format 1.6 and run Bazaar 1.7 or later.

See Jono’s blog post for more detail.

This bug affects me too

If you’ve ever come to file a bug and found that it’s already been reported, you may have wanted to let the project know that you too have been affected.

Trouble is: many projects find “me too” comments unhelpful because they don’t add much to the discussion.

Launchpad’s new “This bug affects me too” feature lets you record just that but without the guilt! Give it a go in our staging environment.

We’ll use the “me too” data in future to help projects identify hot bugs.

Also in Launchpad 2.1.10

You can find the full details of this release on its milestone page.

Getting help with Launchpad

Each weekday, members of the Launchpad team are taking turns to offer help with Launchpad. Check the #launchpad channel topic or our wiki page to see who’s on duty.

And finally…

Launchpad 2.1.11 is due on the 19th November. In the mean time, join us in #launchpad on Freenode and on the launchpad-users mailing list.

If you come across any bugs in Launchpad, please report them!

Recent scene at Launchpad HQ

There are few things more frustrating than working on something and then being held up because you can’t get the help you need. I know this all too well: my quest for world domination has long been stalled because the sonic screwdriver help-line people never answer my emails.

With Launchpad, we’re trying something new to make sure you get the help you need. Each week day there’s a named member of the Launchpad team whose job is to answer your questions, whether in #launchpad, in Launchpad Answers, on launchpad-users or to help@launchpad.net.

This means that on top of the usual cast of Launchpad types in #launchpad, for eight or so hours each day you’ll have a named contact that you can ping for help.

You can see which person’s on duty by checking the Help Rotation page on the Launchpad help wiki and also by looking at #launchpad’s channel topic.

Let us know what you think of the new help rotation and how we can improve it.

Telephone operators photograph from Seattle Municipal Archives. Creative Commons licensed.

You didn’t expect it, but here it is. “This Week in Launchpad’s Web API” returns for one more week! This week we’re pleased to announce that you can now search the bug tasks associated with a project, project group, distribution, or milestone. We know a lot of people have been waiting for this feature.

>>> launchpadlib_project = launchpad.projects['launchpadlib']
>>> me = launchpad.me
>>> my_launchpadlib_bugs = launchpadlib_project.searchTasks(assignee=me)


The interface to searchTasks is very similar to the interface to Launchpad’s advanced search form. That fact should get you started searching easily.

The other bug news is that you can now post a comment to a bug by invoking newMessage on the bug.

Release files are now exposed through the web service. This means you can now integrate release management tools into Launchpad. When you do a release of your program, the same tool that packages the release can upload the release file to Launchpad and make a Launchpad release for it.

>>> series = launchpad.projects['myproject'].series[0]
>>> release = series.addRelease(
...     version=new_item_name, code_name='sumo',
...     summary='super new beta',
...     description='The be-all end-all version for the next century.',
...     changelog='Fixes security bug. Adds external support.')
>>> release.add_file(filename="release.tgz",
...     file_content="[binary data]",
...     content_type="application/x-gzip")


Finally, we’ve changed launchpadlib so that when you upload a file, you need to set the filename you want the file to have on the server side. Previously, there was no way to set the filename.

>>> release_file = release.files[0]
>>> filehandle = release_file.open("application/x-gzip", "new-filename.tgz", "w")
>>> ...


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.

(more…)

Barry Warsaw, Francis Lacoste, and I gave an IRC chat about the Launchpad web service as part of Ubuntu Developer Week. There’s a transcript available in case you missed it.

The big news from last week is that we finally have the API documentation being generated whenever a new version of Launchpad is deployed. Whatever server your script is running against, the /+apidoc URL will contain the reference documentation for that version of Launchpad. launchpad.net’s documentation will change when we do an official release of Launchpad, and edge.launchpad.net’s and staging.launchpad.net’s will be updated much more often, as our changes get pushed out to those servers.

But there’s more! I also added support to launchpadlib for access to the binary files hosted by Launchpad: mugshots, bug attachments, and so on. This is everything described in the reference doc as “a file resource.” If you upgrade launchpadlib, you can now access these files with a Pythonic file object interface.

The server side of this has been in place since we launched the web service, so in theory you could have been messing with uploaded files this whole time by writing a custom-built client. But only recently did I update the hacking document that makes it easy to see how to do this.

Finally, Edwin, Brad, and I have continued working on exporting the Launchpad registry. Of note are three new hosted-file resources: a project’s brand, logo, and icon. Project groups also have more of their fields published.

This week: more things published through the registry, hopefully some progress on bugs as well.