Matthew.revell on Launchpad Blog

Mercurial imports will end on October 5th

Matthew Revell — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:54:01 +0000

On the 5th of October we’ll be ending our beta of Mercurial imports in Launchpad. On that day your existing Mercurial imports will cease and you won’t be able to create new ones.

This doesn’t affect Bazaar, Git, Subversion or CVS imports.

You’re probably wondering why. During the beta, we found that not many people wanted to import Mercurial branches into Launchpad. Today there are only around forty people using the facility. It’s also fair to say that our importer wasn’t of the quality we want for Launchpad.

So, with low demand for the feature we decided to focus engineering effort elsewhere rather than continue to maintain, or fix up, a less than satisfactory feature.

I’m sorry if you currently rely on Launchpad to import code from Mercurial into Bazaar. You can, though, still use the bzr-hg plugin locally.

Launchpad code hosting unavailable 22.00 UTC 2012-08-17

Matthew Revell — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 10:45:54 +0000

Launchpad’s code hosting will be unavailable, due to planned maintenance, for four hours starting 22.00 UTC on Friday the 17th August.

This will affect pushing to and pulling from branches, merge proposals, build from branch and translations activity involving code branches. It is in addition to the already announced disruption to Personal Package Archives for the same time.

Starts: 22.00 UTC 2012-08-17
Expected back by: 02.00 UTC 2012-08-18

We’re sorry for the disruption to your service.

Work items in blueprints

Matthew Revell — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:49:06 +0000

At its most basic, a blueprint in Launchpad is a statement of intent: by creating a blueprint, you’re saying, “Here’s an idea for how this project should progress.”

How do you track the detailed steps to get from having the idea to seeing it implemented?

The Ubuntu development community came up with a solution: they break a blueprint down into items of work that can be assigned to an individual. That makes it easier to track who’s doing what and how they’re getting on, while the blueprint itself tracks the status of the big idea.

Until now, these work items weren’t recognised by Launchpad. Instead, Ubuntu and Linaro tracked them in the blueprint’s whiteboard. Using the Launchpad API, they pulled the whiteboard contents out and used them to generate burn-down charts for status.ubuntu.com and status.linaro.org.

Now, thanks to work by some of the team at Linaro, each blueprint has a text box where you can add, update and delete its related work items.

How you make use of work items will depend on the project you’re working on. Both Ubuntu and Linaro already make extensive use of work items and, if you’re working as part of those communities, you should follow their lead.

Using work items

Work items are pretty simple to use.

Here’s an example of how a set of work items might look:

  Design the user interaction: DONE
  Visual design: INPROGRESS
  Test the UI: TODO
  Decide on an API format: POSTPONED
  Bootstrap the dev environment: TODO
  Set up Jenkins CI: TODO
  As you can see, each work item sits on its own line and you indicate its status after a colon.

As you can see, each work item sits on its own line and you indicate its status after a colon. The statuses you can use are:

TODO
INPROGRESS
POSTPONED
DONE

Sometimes a blueprint can be targeted to one milestone but you’ll have a individual work items that need to be targeted to a different milestone. That’s fine, you can tell Launchpad that a bunch of work items are for some other milestone.

In the work items text box, simply use a header like this:

  Work items for <milestone>:

If you enter an invalid milestone you’ll get an error message and the opportunity to correct the text field.

A milestone picker will of course be more useful and we’ve submitted a bug to keep track of that.

What’s next?

Soon, you’ll be able get a view of all the work items and bugs assigned to a particular individual or team for a particular milestone.

Of course, if you have other ideas for how Launchpad can make use of work items, we’d love to hear from you.

Photo by Courtney Dirks. Licence: CC BY 2.0

Launchpad translations disruption 10.00 UTC 2011-11-29

Matthew Revell — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:12:07 +0000

Launchpad translations will be unavailable for around one hour, starting 10.00 UTC, on Tuesday 2011-11-29, to allow us to open the translations for the next Ubuntu release, Precise Pangolin (to be 12.04 LTS).

We tried this last week but hit some problems. Rather than prolong the disruption, we decided to bring translations back online and delay the opening of Precise’s translations until after we’d fixed the issue.

While we’re opening Precise’s translations, Launchpad will not be importing translation files and the web interface for making and reviewing translations will be unavailable. This includes imports for translation uploads, but also imports from Bazaar branches.

Once this is done, imports will resume normally and any backlog should be processed quickly after that.

Launchpad translations disruption 10.00 UTC 2011-11-22

Matthew Revell — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:12:09 +0000

Launchpad translations will be unavailable for around one hour, starting 10.00 UTC, on Tuesday 2011-11-22.

During this time Launchpad will not be importing translation files and the web interface for making and reviewing translations will be unavailable. This includes imports for translation uploads, but also imports from Bazaar branches.

We are suspending the service temporarily to allow us to set up translations for the next Ubuntu release, Precise Pangolin (to be 12.04 LTS). Once this is done, imports will resume normally and any backlog should be processed quickly after that.

Ubuntu SSO and Launchpad service disruption 10.30 UTC 17th November 2011

Matthew Revell — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:14:56 +0000

Ubuntu’s single sign-on service will be read-only for around 15 minutes starting at 10.30 UTC on the 17th November. At the same time, Launchpad will be offline.

This means that you should be able to log into websites that depend on the Ubuntu single sign-on service, but not make changes to your login or register a new account. It also means that anything involving Launchpad will be unavailable during that time.

Starts: 10.30 UTC 17th November 2011
Expected back by: 10.45 UTC 17th November 2011

We’re sorry for this service disruption. During this time we’ll be making a database upgrade.

Launchpad offline 08.30-08.45 UTC 10th November, single sign-on read-only

Matthew Revell — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 17:16:51 +0000

Launchpad will be entirely offline and Ubuntu’s single sign-on service will be read-only for around 15 minutes from 08.30 UTC on the 10th November.

Goes offline: 08.30 UTC 2011-11-10
Expected back: 08.45 UTC 2011-11-10

This is to allow us to make a database upgrade. We’re sorry for the disruption that this will cause.

Welcome to BerliOS projects

Matthew Revell — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:45:41 +0000

It’s sad to read that BerliOS will close in December, after nearly twelve years of serving open source projects. One fewer project hosting site means that the open source world is that bit poorer.

If you’ve been hosting your project on the BerliOS Developer platform and you’re looking for a new home, you’ve got plenty of choice.

We’d love to welcome you to Launchpad and here are a few reasons why you should consider Launchpad:

We can help you import your bug history from BerliOS
Importing your Subversion repositories is straightforward, too, and something that we’ve done for thousands of repos.
There’s more to Launchpad than bug tracking and code hosting: code review, support request tracking, blueprint for spec tracking, personal package archives and automated daily builds for getting software to Ubuntu users, translations with a large and active community, plus there’s a web services API.
You’ll get friendly help in our IRC channel and on our mailing list.
Bazaar rocks.
Launchpad itself is open source software.

If you have questions, you’re very welcome to join us in #launchpad on FreeNode and the launchpad-users mailing list.

Deployment reports are now public

Matthew Revell — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:35:06 +0000

Steve Kowalik writes:

For a while now Launchpad has been using deployment reports that tell us what state our QA is in, which revisions are safe to deploy to production, or which revisions are not safe to deploy since they failed QA.

Some time ago, I started the process to make these reports public, and I’m proud to announce that today, they are!

If you’re waiting to see when your code in Launchpad is likely to go live, take a look at the new public deployment report.

08.30 UTC is super fast down-time ... time

Matthew Revell — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:04:42 +0000

Tomorrow, you may notice a blip in Launchpad’s availability around 08.30 UTC. Believe it or not, this is good news :)

Until tomorrow, we’d been rolling out database changes — schema updates, database server maintenance, etc — once a month, with a 90 minute period where Launchpad was read-only.

Now, we’re doing things a little differently: two or three times a week, we’ll be doing a fast database update at 08.30 UTC (weekdays only). To start with, it won’t quite be “blink and you’ll miss it”. We’re talking around two minutes but we’ve already identified ways to cut this time. During the update, Launchpad will be effectively unavailable. But it’ll be quick and at a predictable time each day that we do it.

So, other than the obvious bonus of not having Launchpad go read-only for a big 90 minute block every month, why’s this good news? As it’s always at the same and for a short time, we think it’ll be easier to work around. The down-time won’t even be long enough to make a decent cup of tea or coffee. Importantly, it also means you’ll get new Launchpad code faster: if a new feature or a bug fix requires a database schema change, we can now roll it out pretty much within 24 hours rather than waiting up to a month for the next big 90 minute read-only time.

There’s a bug we need to fix: right now, during the fast down-time you’ll get an OOPS when Launchpad tries to access the database. Once we’ve fixed the bug you’ll get a somewhat friendlier and more appropriate 503 error.

While we’re all getting used to it, we’ll still announce these fast database updates on the status feed. We’re hopeful, though, that they’ll be quick enough and predictable enough (08.30 UTC weekdays, two or three times a week) that eventually you’ll have to try hard to notice them.