bug fixes on Launchpad Blog

Launchpad security advisory: Fix applied for unsafe tar file extraction vulnerability

Clinton Fung — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:00:10 +0000

We received a private report from a security researcher describing a vulnerability affecting Launchpad. The vulnerability involved the unsafe processing of tar files at build upload and custom upload. We investigated promptly and deployed a fix shortly after the report. The reporting party has confirmed the issue is no longer exploitable.

Following remediation, we completed additional review and monitoring. We found no evidence of malicious exploitation. No user action is required.

We are sharing this update as part of our ongoing commitment to transparency and security.

We thank splitline (@_splitline_) and the DEVCORE Research Team for privately reporting this issue.

Launchpad news, March 2019 - July 2019

Colin Watson — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 18:16:20 +0000

Here’s a brief changelog of what we’ve been up to since our last general update.

Bugs

Add basic GitLab bug linking (#1603679)
Expect the upstream bug ID in the “number” field of GitHub issue objects, not the “id” field (#1824728)
Include metadata-only bug changes in Person:+commentedbugs

Build farm

Filter ASCII NUL characters out of build logtails (#1831500)
Encode non-bytes subprocess arguments on Python 2 to avoid crashing on non-ASCII file names under LC_CTYPE=C (#1832072)

Code

Don’t preload recipe data when deleting recipes associated with branches or repositories, and add some more job indexes (#1793266, #1828062)
Fix crash if checkRefPermissions finds that the repository is nonexistent
Add a rescan button to branch merge proposals for failed branch or repository scans
Land parts of the work required for Git HTTPS push tokens, though this is not yet complete (#1824399)
Refactor code import authorisation to be clearer and safer
Set line-height on <pre> elements in Bazaar file views
Work in progress to redeploy Launchpad’s Git backend on more scalable infrastructure

Infrastructure

Upgrade to PostgreSQL 10
Fix make-lp-user, broken by the fix for #1576142
Use our own GPG key retrieval implementation when verifying signatures rather than relying on auto-key-retrieve
Give urlfetch a default timeout, fixing a regression in process-mail (#1820552)
Make test suite pass on Ubuntu 18.04
Retry webhook deliveries that respond with 4xx for an hour rather than a day
Merge up to a current version of Storm
Upgrade to Celery 4.1.1
Move development sites from .dev to .test
Upgrade to Twisted 19.2.1
Upgrade to requests 2.22.0
Use defusedxml to parse untrusted XML
Improve caching of several delegated authorization checks (#1834625)

Registry

Fix redaction in pillar listings of projects for which the user only has LimitedView (#1650430)
Tighten up the permitted pattern for newly-chosen usernames

Snappy

Landed parts of the work required to support private snap builds, though this is not yet complete (#1639975)
Generalise snap channel handling slightly, allowing channel selection for core16 and core18
Add build-aux/snap/snapcraft.yaml to the list of possible snapcraft.yaml paths (#1805219)
Add build-request-id and build-request-timestamp to SNAPCRAFT_IMAGE_INFO
Allow selecting source snap channels when requesting manual snap builds (#1791265)
Push build start timestamps to the store, and use release intents so that builds are more reliably released to channels in the proper sequence (#1684529)
Try to manually resolve symlinks in remote Git repositories when fetching snapcraft.yaml (#1797366)
Consistently commit transactions in SnapStoreUploadJob (#1833424)
Use build request jobs for all snap build requests in the web UI
Honour “base: bare” and “build-base” when requesting snap builds (#1819196)

Soyuz (package management)

Add command-not-found metadata in the archive to the Release file
Check the .deb format using dpkg-deb rather than ar
Add s390x Secure Initial Program Load signing support (#1829749)
Add u-boot Flat Image Tree signing support (#1831942)
Use timeout(1) to limit debdiff rather than using alarm(3) ourselves
Allow configuring the binary file retention period of a LiveFS (#1832477)
Import source packages from Debian bullseye

Launchpad news, February 2019

Colin Watson — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 16:32:09 +0000

Here’s a brief changelog for this month.

Build farm

Allow dispatching builds with base images selected based on the pocket and/or using LXD images instead of chroot tarballs where appropriate (#1811677)

Code

Store bzr-svn’s cache in the import data store
Allow project owners to use the Bazaar branch rescan view
Canonicalise expected rule ordering in GitRepository.setRules (#1815431)
Upgrade to pygit2 0.27.4 (#1815517)

Infrastructure

Use full gpg key fingerprints in rocketfuel-setup (contributed by Andy Brody; #1814206)

Snappy

Support snap bases (#1812985)

Soyuz (package management)

Allow source .changes files to omit the Binary field (#1813037)

Launchpad news, July 2018 - January 2019

Colin Watson — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 23:28:42 +0000

Here’s a brief changelog of what we’ve been up to since our last general update.

Bugs

Parse a few more possible Savane URL formats (#197250)
Compare Bugzilla versions properly when checking whether they support the Bugzilla API (part of #1802798)

Build farm

Configure snap proxy settings for Subversion (#1668358)
Support passing IMAGE_TARGETS, REPO_SNAPSHOT_STAMP, and COHORT_KEY variables into live filesystem builds
Set SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT=host when building snaps (#1791201)
Prevent gathering results of large builds from blocking responses to XML-RPC requests (#1795877)
Add missing indexes on LiveFSFile(libraryfile) and SnapFile(libraryfile)
Direct build failure support to Launchpad Answers rather than to the launchpad-buildd-admins team (#1810001)

Code

Allow proposing merges between different branches of the same personal Git repository
Fix OOPS when trying to look up ~user/project:branch as a unique Git repository name (#1771118)
Optimise GitRepository.fetchRefCommits if there are no commits to fetch
Handle the case where a Bazaar branch and a Git repository have the same identity URL when creating a recipe (#1623924)
Push code imports over bzr+ssh rather than sftp (#1779572)
Fix crash when emailing inline comments on a diff with non-ASCII characters in hunk headers (#1787587)
Percent-encode reference names in GitRef URLs (#1787965)
Add active reviews link to Git-based project pages (#1777102)
Fix handling of non-ASCII ref names
Include the appropriate username in git+ssh:// URLs in the UI
Add instructions on creating personal Git repositories to people’s “View Git repositories” pages (#1590560)
Add available review targets and proposals to the Git repository overview page (#1789847)
Fix incorrect visibility check that broke code imports targeted at private Git repositories (#1789424)
Allow anonymous users to view votes for public merge proposals (#1786474)
Make Git ref scan jobs for repositories with large numbers of refs take much less memory
Tolerate backend timeouts while fetching commit information for GitRef:+index (#1804395)
Add Git per-branch permissions (#1517559)
Add rescan buttons when various kinds of code scanning jobs fail (#1808320)

Infrastructure

Convert all remaining code to use explicit proxy configuration settings rather than picking up a proxy from the environment, making the effective production settings easier to understand
Add support for ECDSA SSH keys (#907675)

Libraries

wadllib 1.3.3: Reimplement MIME multipart/form-data encoding without binary corruption bugs (#1729754)
lazr.restfulclient 0.14.2: Improve compatibility with various httplib2 versions (#1803558)

Registry

Add a suspend-bot-account.py script to suspend an account by email address
Weaken type of key_text in Person.deleteSSHKeysFromSSO so that more existing keys can be deleted (#1780411)
Fix SSHKey.getFullKeyText to not crash on some corrupt keys (#1798046)
Various improvements to the close-account script

Snappy

Extract initial Snap.store_name from snapcraft.yaml for Bazaar as well as Git
Add support for Snapcraft’s architectures keyword (#1770400)
Bump SnapStoreUploadJob.max_retries to 30 to allow for longer store scan times
Include the registered store package name for a snap recipe in its builds’ titles if it exists and differs from the snap recipe name
Move some metadata from SnapStoreUploadJob to SnapBuild, to prevent store upload jobs getting into states that cannot be retried

Soyuz (package management)

Add Archive.getSigningKeyData, currently just proxying through to the keyserver (#1667725)
Add extendedKeyUsage information to kmod signing keys so that they can only be used to sign modules, not boot loaders or kernels (#1774746)

Launchpad news, June 2018

Colin Watson — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 00:18:52 +0000

Here’s a brief changelog for this month.

Bugs

Handle Bugzilla.time() changes in Bugzilla 5.1.1 (#1774838)
Cope with the comment author field being renamed to creator in recent Bugzilla versions (#1774838)

Build farm

Set the hostname and FQDN of LXD containers to match the host system, though with an IP address pointing to the container (#1747015)
If the extra build arguments include fast_cleanup: True, then skip the final cleanup steps of the build; this can be used when building in a VM that is guaranteed to be torn down after the build
Allow checking out a git tag rather than a branch (#1687078, forum post)
Add a local unauthenticated proxy on port 8222, which proxies through to the remote authenticated proxy; this should allow running a wider range of network clients, since some of them apparently don’t support authenticated proxies very well (#1690834, #1753340, forum post)
Run tar with correct working directory when building source tarballs for snaps

Code

Port the loggerhead (Bazaar code browser) integration to gunicorn, allowing it to be used as an internal API as well
Optimise BuildableDistroSeries.findSeries (#1778732)
Proxy loggerhead branch diffs through the webapp, allowing AJAX MP revision diffs to work for private branches (#904070)

Infrastructure

Convert most code to use explicit proxy configuration settings rather than picking up a proxy from the environment, making the effective production settings easier to understand

Registry

Fix crash while adding an ssh key with unknown type (#1777507)

Miscellaneous

Improve documentation of what deactivating an account does (#993153)

Launchpad news, May 2018

Colin Watson — Sat, 02 Jun 2018 19:44:45 +0000

Here’s a brief changelog for this month.

Build farm

Send fast_cleanup: True to virtualised builds, since they can safely skip the final cleanup steps

Code

Add spam controls to code review comments (#1680746)
Only consider the most recent nine successful builds when estimating recipe build durations (#1770121)
Make updated code import emails more informative

Infrastructure

Upgrade to Twisted 17.9.0
Get the test suite passing on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Allow admins to configure users such that unsigned email from them will be rejected, as a spam defence (#1714967)

Snappy

Prune old snap files that have been uploaded to the store; this cleaned up about 5TB of librarian space
Make the snap store client cope with a few more edge cases (#1766911)
Allow branches in snap store channel names (#1754405)

Soyuz (package management)

Add DistroArchSeries.setChrootFromBuild, allowing setting a chroot from a file produced by a live filesystem build
Disambiguate URLs to source package files in the face of filename clashes in imported archives
Optimise SourcePackagePublishingHistory:+listing-archive-extra (#1769979)

Miscellaneous

Disable purchasing of new commercial subscriptions; existing customers have been contacted, and people with questions about this can contact Canonical support
Various minor revisions to the terms of service from Canonical’s legal department, and a clearer data privacy policy

Launchpad news, June 2017 - April 2018

Colin Watson — Tue, 01 May 2018 18:19:04 +0000

Once again it’s been a while since we posted a general update, so here’s a changelog-style summary of what we’ve been up to. As usual, this changelog preserves a reasonable amount of technical detail, but I’ve omitted changes that were purely internal refactoring with no externally-visible effects.

Answers

Hide questions on inactive projects from the results of non-pillar-specific searches

Blueprints

Optimise the main query on Person:+upcomingwork (#1692120)
Apply the spec privacy check on Person:+upcomingwork only to relevant specs (#1696519)
Move base clauses for specification searches into a CTE to avoid slow sequential scans

Bugs

Switch to HTTPS for CVE references
Fix various failures to sync from Red Hat’s Bugzilla instance (#1678486)

Build farm

Send the necessary set of archive signing keys to builders (#1626739)
Hide the virt/nonvirt queue portlets on BuilderSet:+index if they’d be empty
Add a feature flag which can be used to prevent dispatching any build under a given minimum score
Write files fetched from builders to a temporary name, and only rename them into place on success
Emit the build URL at the start of build logs

Code

Fix crash when scanning a Git-based MP when we need to link a new RevisionAuthor to an existing Person (#1693543)
Add source ref name to breadcrumbs for Git-based MPs; this gets the ref name into the page title, which makes it easier to find Git-based MPs in browser history
Allow registry experts to delete recipes
Explicitly mark the local apt archive for recipe builds as trusted (#1701826)
Set +code as the default view on the code layer for (Person)DistributionSourcePackage
Improve handling of branches with various kinds of partial data
Add and export BranchMergeProposal.scheduleDiffUpdates (#483945)
Move “Updating repository…” notice above the list of branches so that it’s harder to miss (#1745161)
Upgrade to Pygments 2.2.0, including better formatting of *.md files (#1740903)
Sort cancelled-before-starting recipe builds to the end of the build history (#746140)
Clean up the {Branch,GitRef}:+register-merge UI slightly
Optimise merge detection when the branch has no landing candidates

Infrastructure

Use correct method separator in Allow headers (#1717682)
Optimise lp_sitecustomize so that bin/py starts up more quickly
Add a utility to make it easier to run Launchpad code inside lxc exec
Convert lp-source-dependencies to git
Remove the post-webservice-GET commit
Convert build system to virtualenv and pip, unblocking many upgrades of dependencies
Use eslint to lint JavaScript files
Tidy up various minor problems in the top-level Makefile (#483782)
Offering ECDSA or Ed25519 SSH keys to Launchpad SSH servers no longer causes a hang, although it still isn’t possible to use them for authentication (#830679)
Reject SSH public keys that Twisted can’t load (#230144)
Backport GPGME file descriptor handling improvements to fix timeouts importing GPG keys (#1753019)
Improve OOPSes for jobs
Switch the site-wide search to Bing Custom Search, since Google Site Search has been discontinued
Don’t send email to direct recipients without active accounts

Registry

Fix the privacy banner on PersonProduct pages
Show GPG fingerprints rather than collidable short key IDs (#1576142)
Fix PersonSet.getPrecachedPersonsFromIDs to handle teams with mailing lists
Optimise front page, mainly by gathering more statistics periodically rather than on the fly
Construct public keyserver links using HTTPS without an explicit port (#1739110)
Fall back to emailing the team owner if the team has no admins (#1270141)

Snappy

Log some useful information from authorising macaroons while uploading snaps to the store, to make it easier to diagnose problems
Extract more useful error messages when snap store operations fail (#1650461, #1687068)
Send mail rather than OOPSing if refreshing snap store upload macaroons fails (#1668368)
Automatically retry snap store upload attempts that return 502 or 503
Initialise git submodules in snap builds (#1694413)
Make SnapStoreUploadJob retries go via celery and be much more responsive (#1689282)
Run snap builds in LXD containers, allowing them to install snaps as build-dependencies
Allow setting Snap.git_path directly on the webservice
Batch snap listing views (#1722562)
Fix AJAX update of snap builds table to handle all build statuses
Set SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_INFO=1 to tell snapcraft to generate a manifest
Only emit snap:build:0.1 webhooks from SnapBuild.updateStatus if the status has changed
Expose extended error messages (with external link) for snap build jobs (#1729580)
Begin work on allowing snap builds to install snapcraft as a snap; this can currently be set up via the API, and work is in progress to add UI and to migrate to this as the default (#1737994)
Add an admin option to disable external network access for snap builds
Export ISnapSet.findByOwner on the webservice
Prefer Snap.store_name over Snap.name for the “name” argument dispatched to snap builds
Pass build URL to snapcraft using SNAPCRAFT_IMAGE_INFO
Add an option to build source tarballs for snaps (#1763639)

Soyuz (package management)

Stop SourcePackagePublishingHistory.getPublishedBinaries materialising rows outside the current batch; this fixes webservice timeouts for sources with large numbers of binaries (#1695113)
Implement proxying of PackageUpload binary files via the webapp, since DistroSeries:+queue now assumes that that works (#1697680)
Truncate signing key common-names to 64 characters (#1608615)
Allow setting a relative build score on live filesystems (#1452543)
Add signing support for vmlinux for use on ppc64el Opal (and compatible) firmware
Run live filesystem builds in LXD containers, allowing them to install snaps as build-dependencies
Accept a “debug” entry in live filesystem build metadata, which enables detailed live-build debugging
Accept and ignore options (e.g. [trusted=yes]) in sources.list lines passed via external_dependencies
Send proper email notifications about most failures to parse the .changes file (#499438)
Ensure that PPA .htpasswd salts are drawn from the correct alphabet (#1722209)
Improve DpkgArchitectureCache’s timeline handling, and speed it up a bit in some cases (#1062638)
Support passing a snap channel into a live filesystem build through the environment
Add support for passing apt proxies to live-build
Allow anonymous launchpad.View on IDistributionSourcePackage
Handle queries starting with “ppa:” when searching the PPA vocabulary
Make PackageTranslationsUploadJob download librarian files to disk rather than memory
Send email notifications when an upload is signed with an expired key
Add Release, Release.gpg, and InRelease to by-hash directories
After publishing a custom file, mark its target suite as dirty so that it will be published (#1509026)

Translations

Fix text_to_html to not parse HTML as a C format string
Fall back to the package name from AC_INIT when expanding $(PACKAGE) in translation configuration files if no other definition can be found

Miscellaneous

Show a search icon for pickers where possible rather than “Choose…”

Launchpad news, May 2017

Colin Watson — Wed, 31 May 2017 22:35:39 +0000

Here’s a brief changelog for this month.

Bugs

Export searchTasks for the top-level bugs collection on the webservice, and implement a global bugs feed to go with it (#434244)

Code

Fix git-to-git code imports on xenial
Backport upstream serf commit to fix svn-to-bzr code imports on xenial (#1690613)
Fix crash when unlinking a bug from a Git-based MP in UpdatePreviewDiffJob
Handle revision ID passed to BranchMergeProposal.setStatus for transitions to MERGED

Infrastructure

Fix processing of purchased Launchpad commercial subscriptions
Some progress towards converting the build system to pip, though there’s quite a bit more work to do there

Registry

Remove extra internal slashes from URLs requested by the mirror prober (#1692347)

Snappy

Record the branch revision used to build a snap and return it along with other XML-RPC status information (#1679157)
Configure a git:// proxy for snap builds (#1663920)
Allow configuring a snap to build from the current branch of a Git repository rather than explicitly naming a branch (#1688224)

Soyuz (package management)

Precache permissions for archives returned by Person.getVisiblePPAs (#1685202)
Drop requirement for source .buildinfo files to be signed
Make DistroSeries:+queue link to upload files via the webapp, to help dget users

Launchpad news, November 2015 - April 2017

Colin Watson — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 14:08:57 +0000

Well, it’s been a while! Since we last posted a general update, the Launchpad team has become part of Canonical’s Online Services department, so some of our efforts have gone into other projects. There’s still plenty happening with Launchpad, though, and here’s a changelog-style summary of what we’ve been up to.

Answers

Lock down question title and description edits from random users
Prevent answer contacts from editing question titles and descriptions
Prevent answer contacts from editing FAQs

Blueprints

Optimise SpecificationSet.getStatusCountsForProductSeries, fixing Product:+series timeouts
Add sprint deletion support (#2888)
Restrict blueprint count on front page to public blueprints

Build farm

Add fallback if nominated architecture-independent architecture is unavailable for building (#1530217)
Try to load the nbd module when starting launchpad-buildd (#1531171)
Default LANG/LC_ALL to C.UTF-8 during binary package builds (#1552791)
Convert buildd-manager to use a connection pool rather than trying to download everything at once (#1584744)
Always decode build logtail as UTF-8 rather than guessing (#1585324)
Move non-virtualised builders to the bottom of /builders; Ubuntu is now mostly built on virtualised builders
Pass DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noautodbgsym during binary package builds if we have not been told to build debug symbols (#1623256)

Bugs

Use standard milestone ordering for bug task milestone choices (#1512213)
Make bug activity records visible to anonymous API requests where appropriate (#991079)
Use a monospace font for “Add comment” boxes for bugs, to match how the comments will be displayed (#1366932)
Fix BugTaskSet.createManyTasks to map Incomplete to its storage values (#1576857)
Add basic GitHub bug linking (#848666)
Prevent rendering of private team names in bugs feed (#1592186)
Update CVE database XML namespace to match current file on cve.mitre.org
Fix Bugzilla bug watches to support new versions that permit multiple aliases
Sort bug tasks related to distribution series by series version rather than series name (#1681899)

Code

Remove always-empty portlet from Person:+branches (#1511559)
Fix OOPS when editing a Git repository with over a thousand refs (#1511838)
Add Git links to DistributionSourcePackage:+branches and DistributionSourcePackage:+all-branches (#1511573)
Handle prerequisites in Git-based merge proposals (#1489839)
Fix OOPS when trying to register a Git merge with a target path but no target repository
Show an “Updating repository…” indication when there are pending writes
Launchpad’s Git hosting backend is now self-hosted
Fix setDefaultRepository(ForOwner) to cope with replacing an existing default (#1524316)
Add “Configure Code” link to Product:+git
Fix Git diff generation crash on non-ASCII conflicts (#1531051)
Fix stray link to +editsshkeys on Product:+configure-code when SSH keys were already registered (#1534159)
Add support for Git recipes (#1453022)
Fix OOPS when adding a comment to a Git-based merge proposal without using AJAX (#1536363)
Fix shallow git clones over HTTPS (#1547141)
Add new “Code” portlet on Product:+index to make it easier to find source code (#531323)
Add missing table around widget row on Product:+configure-code, so that errors are highlighted properly (#1552878)
Sort GitRepositorySet.getRepositories API results to make batching reliable (#1578205)
Show recent commits on GitRef:+index
Show associated merge proposals in Git commit listings
Show unmerged and conversation-relevant Git commits in merge proposal views (#1550118)
Implement AJAX revision diffs for Git
Fix scanning branches with ghost revisions in their ancestry (#1587948)
Fix decoding of Git diffs involving non-UTF-8 text that decodes to unpaired surrogates when treated as UTF-8 (#1589411)
Fix linkification of references to Git repositories (#1467975)
Fix +edit-status for Git merge proposals (#1538355)
Include username in git+ssh URLs (#1600055)
Allow linking bugs to Git-based merge proposals (#1492926)
Make Person.getMergeProposals have a constant query count on the webservice (#1619772)
Link to the default git repository on Product:+index (#1576494)
Add Git-to-Git code imports (#1469459)
Improve preloading of {Branch,GitRepository}.{landing_candidates,landing_targets}, fixing various timeouts
Export GitRepository.getRefByPath (#1654537)
Add GitRepository.rescan method, useful in cases when a scan crashed

Infrastructure

Launchpad’s SSH endpoints (bazaar.launchpad.net, git.launchpad.net, upload.ubuntu.com, and ppa.launchpad.net) now support newer key exchange and MAC algorithms, allowing compatibility with OpenSSH >= 7.0 (#1445619)
Make cross-referencing code more efficient for large numbers of IDs (#1520281)
Canonicalise path encoding before checking a librarian TimeLimitedToken (#677270)
Fix Librarian to generate non-cachable 500s on missing storage files (#1529428)
Document the standard DELETE method in the apidoc (#753334)
Add a PLACEHOLDER account type for use by SSO-only accounts
Add support to +login for acquiring discharge macaroons from SSO via an OpenID exchange (#1572605)
Allow managing SSH keys in SSO
Re-raise unexpected HTTP errors when talking to the GPG key server
Ensure that the production dump is usable before destroying staging
Log SQL statements as Unicode to avoid confusing page rendering when the visible_render_time flag is on (#1617336)
Fix the librarian to fsync new files and their parent directories
Handle running Launchpad from a Git working tree
Handle running Launchpad on Ubuntu 16.04 (upgrade currently in progress)
Fix delete_unwanted_swift_files to not crash on segments (#1642411)
Update database schema for PostgreSQL 9.5 and 9.6
Check fingerprints of keys received from the keyserver rather than trusting it implicitly

Registry

Make public SSH key records visible to anonymous API requests (#1014996)
Don’t show unpublished packages or package names from private PPAs in search results from the package picker (#42298, #1574807)
Make Person.time_zone always be non-None, allowing us to easily show the edit widget even for users who have never set their time zone (#1568806)
Let latest questions, specifications and products be efficiently calculated
Let project drivers edit series and productreleases, as series drivers can; project drivers should have series driver power over all series
Fix misleading messages when joining a delegated team
Allow team privacy changes when referenced by CodeReviewVote.reviewer or BugNotificationRecipient.person
Don’t limit Person:+related-projects to a single batch

Snappy

Add webhook support for snaps (#1535826)
Allow deleting snaps even if they have builds
Provide snap builds with a proxy so that they can access external network resources
Add support for automatically uploading snap builds to the store (#1572605)
Update latest snap builds table via AJAX
Add option to trigger snap builds when top-level branch changes (#1593359)
Add processor selection in new snap form
Add option to automatically release snap builds to store channels after upload (#1597819)
Allow manually uploading a completed snap build to the store
Upload *.manifest files from builders as well as *.snap (#1608432)
Send an email notification for general snap store upload failures (#1632299)
Allow building snaps from an external Git repository
Move upload to FAILED if its build was deleted (e.g. because of a deleted snap) (#1655334)
Consider snap/snapcraft.yaml and .snapcraft.yaml as well as snapcraft.yaml for new snaps (#1659085)
Add support for building snaps with classic confinement (#1650946)
Fix builds_for_snap to avoid iterating over an unsliced DecoratedResultSet (#1671134)
Add channel track support when uploading snap builds to the store (contributed by Matias Bordese; #1677644)

Soyuz (package management)

Remove some more uses of the confusing .dsc component; add the publishing component to SourcePackage:+index in compensation
Add include_meta option to SPPH.sourceFileUrls, paralleling BPPH.binaryFileUrls
Kill debdiff after ten minutes or 1GiB of output by default, and make sure we clean up after it properly (#314436)
Fix handling of << and >> dep-waits
Allow PPA admins to set external_dependencies on individual binary package builds (#671190)
Fix NascentUpload.do_reject to not send an erroneous Accepted email (#1530220)
Include DEP-11 metadata in Release file if it is present
Consistently generate Release entries for uncompressed versions of files, even if they don’t exist on the filesystem; don’t create uncompressed Packages/Sources files on the filesystem
Handle Build-Depends-Arch and Build-Conflicts-Arch from SPR.user_defined_fields in Sources generation and SP:+index (#1489044)
Make index compression types configurable per-series, and add xz support (#1517510)
Use SHA-512 digests for GPG signing where possible (#1556666)
Re-sign PPAs with SHA-512
Publish by-hash index files (#1430011)
Show SHA-256 checksums rather than MD5 on DistributionSourcePackageRelease:+files (#1562632)
Add a per-series switch allowing packages in supported components to build-depend on packages in unsupported components, used for Ubuntu 16.04 and later
Expand archive signing to kernel modules (contributed by Andy Whitcroft; #1577736)
Uniquely index PackageDiff(from_source, to_source) (part of #1475358)
Handle original tarball signatures in source packages (#1587667)
Add signed checksums for published UEFI/kmod files (contributed by Andy Whitcroft; #1285919)
Add support for named authentication tokens for private PPAs
Show explicit add-apt-repository command on Archive:+index (#1547343)
Use a per-archive OOPS timeline in archivepublisher scripts
Link to package versions on DSP:+index using fmt:url rather than just a relative link to the version, to avoid problems with epochs (#1629058)
Fix RepositoryIndexFile to gzip without timestamps
Fix Archive.getPublishedBinaries API call to have a constant query count (#1635126)
Include the package name in package copy job OOPS reports and emails (#1618133)
Remove headers from Contents files (#1638219)
Notify the Changed-By address for PPA uploads if the .changes contains “Launchpad-Notify-Changed-By: yes” (#1633608)
Accept .debs containing control.tar.xz (#1640280)
Add Archive.markSuiteDirty API call to allow requesting that a given archive/suite be published
Don’t allow cron-control to interrupt publish-ftpmaster part-way through (#1647478)
Optimise non-SQL time in PublishingSet.requestDeletion (#1682096)
Store uploaded .buildinfo files (#1657704)

Translations

Allow TranslationImportQueue to import entries from file objects rather than having to read arbitrarily-large files into memory (#674575)

Miscellaneous

Use gender-neutral pronouns where appropriate
Self-host the Ubuntu webfonts (#1521472)
Make the beta and privacy banners float over the rest of the page when scrolling
Upgrade to pytz 2016.4 (#1589111)
Publish Launchpad’s code revision in an X-Launchpad-Revision header
Truncate large picker search results rather than refusing to display anything (#893796)
Sync up the lists footer with the main webapp footer a bit (#1679093)

Launchpad news, October 2015

Colin Watson — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 19:04:05 +0000

Here’s what the Launchpad team did in October.

Code

Ensure that enabled and restricted processors are left untouched when submitting Archive:+edit (#1501519)
Describe merge proposal listings in the second person (#991945)
Increase Git backend communication timeout to 30 seconds (from 5), as detecting merges can be quite slow on large repositories (#1502748)
Link directly to the recipe/snap in the one-recipe/snap case, rather than redirecting from +recipes/+snaps views (#891918)
Add GitRepository:+subscription traversal (#1503749)
Send notification mail when a merge proposal is superseded (#716169)
Add Branch:+dependent-merges and GitRef:+dependent-merges views (#496056)
Parse extended header lines in git diffs correctly (#1510337)

Additionally, we’ve added webhook support for merge proposals, made a few more UI improvements, and enabled webhooks for beta testers. Feedback welcome!

Snap packages

Allow snap package owners to enable/disable unrestricted processors (matches the change made for PPAs last month)

Soyuz (package building)

Launchpad now accepts uploads of binary packages from builders with file modification times up to 24 hours in the future (rather than 8) or as early as 1975 (rather than 1984), to match Debian
Notifications are no longer generated for package copy jobs that in fact end up being no-ops

Also, as previously announced, we and our sysadmins have been putting a lot of work into extending ScalingStack to other architectures and making it more reliable, and as a result we can now offer general access to PPAs for the ppc64el architecture.