Let’s explore
Published by Diogo Matsubara April 12, 2011 in General
Recently, Ursula and I have been improving the way that we test new Launchpad features.
Already, Launchpad has an extensive test suite but there are some things that automated tests can’t look out for. Rather than just testing the quality of our code, we also want to test the quality of the experience.
To do that, we’ve been doing more exploratory testing. Now, when a feature is getting close to deployment we will try out every part of the feature and make notes of anything in the experience that needs to be fixed before we release it. In particular, we’re interested in the feature’s:
- ease of use and discoverability
- completeness
- quality of implementation
- suitability to the problem it is solving
- conformity to Launchpad’s principles and UI guidelines.
We’re also aiming to timebox the testing; something that takes too long to explore is likely too complex. For now, we’re using a 25 minute limit, as borrowed from The Pomodoro Technique, as it seems like a good starting point.
If you’re interested in what we’re doing, you can follow our progress both on the launchpad-dev mailing list and on the Launchpad dev wiki. Also, I’m hoping that we can get your help in testing beta features. I’ll write more about that soon.
Meet Huw Wilkins
Published by Matthew Revell April 8, 2011 in Meet the devs
Earlier this year Huw Wilkins joined the Launchpad to look after the user interface. Here’s a quick intro to who he is.
Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Huw: I work on Launchpad’s user interface. This means I do a bunch of design work and front-end development. I work with developers and help them to create features with good user interfaces.
I come up with ideas for how we can improve our current interfaces and generally do whatever I can to make Launchpad look better and nicer to use. I’m still relatively new to Launchpad but I hope you will start to see the fruit of this work soon.
Matthew: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?
Huw: Most of the visible work I’ve been doing has been fixing bugs in various parts of our UI. Hopefully you might have noticed there are less small issues and breakages. If you use private bugs then be on the lookout for a new (more obvious) notification style soon.
Matthew: Where do you work?
Huw: I work from home in Sydney, Australia.
Matthew: What can you see from your office window?
Huw: I look out over some rooftops and trees. Sometimes in the evenings I get beautiful sunsets.
Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?
Huw: Most recently I worked for a travel software company in charge of designing the UI for a massive web application. I have also worked as a freelancer and also spent a few years working in tiny fast-paced creative agencies.
Matthew: How did you get into free software?
Huw: A friend of mine handed me a CD with the first beta of Ubuntu (Warty) on it. I quickly discovered a bunch of amazing open source software and I’ve been running Ubuntu ever since.
Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Huw: Principle. But that only works if you live in a vacuum. It would make my job a lot easier if Launchpad lived in a vacuum, but it doesn’t, so I often have to be pragmatic.
Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Huw: A number of years ago I was heavily involved in Ubuntu Studio. In recent years I open sourced a user feedback app for Django that started out as
part of a personal project.
Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Huw: Oh! Oh! You’ll have to wait a bit longer but some of the guys have been working on a way to choose specific types of bug actions that you want
to get emailed about. A lot of people are about to have much happier inboxes.
Matthew: Is there anything in particular that you want to change in Launchpad?
Huw: I want Launchpad to be more personal. There are lots of things going on in Launchpad that do not concern me, and a lot that does. I would love
to make Launchpad do the work of finding that information instead of me.
Matthew: Thanks Huw!
Source package recipes
Published by Matthew Revell April 6, 2011 in Code, Cool new stuff, PPA
Here’s a quick pub quiz:
Question: How do you make packages for Ubuntu?
You can choose from the following answers:
- learn Debian packaging through hours of study and practice
- borrow existing packaging from elsewhere, throw a couple of Bazaar branches together and let Launchpad handle the rest
- Uruguay in both 1930 and 1950.
If you selected either of the first answers you’d be right.
Okay, so, if you want to do it for real — i.e. become an Ubuntu MOTU or otherwise create Debian-style packages from scratch — then you still need to go through the hard work.
However, for everyone else who really just needs to get something out there and working for, say, a group of beta testers, we now have Launchpad’s source package recipes.
How it works, in three steps
It’s almost ridiculously easy to set up a source package build:
- Choose a branch in Launchpad, whether hosted directly or imported.
- Write a short recipe that tells Launchpad which other branches to pull in, for example to provide packaging or make the code buildable.
- Paste your recipe into Launchpad.
And that’s it. Within a few minutes you can set up a daily build direct from your trunk or any other buildable branch in Launchpad.
Watch how it works in our screencast:
An example
Let’s say you’re the developer of a home finance application called Alvin. You track your project’s code using Git and host it on your own server. For the past couple of years Alvin has been packaged in the Ubuntu universe and your trunk has also been imported from Git to a Bazaar branch in Launchpad at lp:alvin.
Just as you’re approaching Alvin’s next release, you want to get some wider testing. In the past, you’ve published a nightly tarball and provided instructions on manual installation. That’s given you a handful of dedicated beta testers but you’re worried that you’re asking too much of people.
With Launchpad’s source package recipes, you write a short recipe that pulls in your trunk branch, adds the packaging from Alvin’s existing Ubuntu package and then builds an installable Ubuntu package in the PPA of your choice:
# bzr-builder format 0.3 deb-version 2.0beta+{revno}
lp:alvin
nest-part packaging lp:ubuntu/alvin debian debian
Paste the recipe into Launchpad and with a couple of clicks you have a daily build of your trunk, that’s published as an Ubuntu package in your PPA.
Now you can ask people to test the latest Alvin code by doing no more than adding your PPA to their system. Launchpad will build a new version of the package on each day it spots a change in your trunk (or the Ubuntu packaging). For your beta testers, any changes will show up just like any other Ubuntu update.
Simple as that!
Here’s a quick recap of how it works: you can take any buildable branch — whether hosted in directly Launchpad or imported from Git, Subversion, CVS or Bazaar hosted elsewhere — merge or nest other branches, add packaging and then leave it to Launchpad to create a daily build that it publishes in your chosen PPA.
Seeing it in action
During the beta, people added a whole range of source package recipes, with a list of more than 350 daily builds as I write this.
Daily builds on Launchpad right now include Project Neon, who have around sixty recipes providing daily builds of KDE and Amarok. There are also daily builds of the Scribus DTP app, Audacity and the scriptable screen reader Gnome Orca.
Try it out
It’s easy to get your own source package recipes and daily builds up and running.
Start at our Getting Started guide and screencast.
I’ll leave the last word to Luke Benstead, who has been using source package recipes while developing a set of game libraries:
I’ve been using LP to develop some small open source game libraries. Because there are quite a few of them, packaging them all is a pain, so the package builds have worked out pretty well for them.
Now I get nightly builds delivered to a PPA, so I know that if I fix a bug it’s reflected to all my machines. And my recipes are only a single line so they’ve been really easy to use. I’m not really sure how they could be easier.
Images:
Beer photo by dearbarbie. CC-BY-SA.
Alvin Hall photo by Phil Guest. CC-BY-SA.
Another bug email improvement: no notification for quickly corrected mistakes
Published by Brad Crittenden April 1, 2011 in Cool new stuff, Notifications
A few weeks ago the Yellow Squad made another change to increase the relevance of the email you get from Launchpad by eliminating some noisy ones. A while back, Matthew Paul Thomas noticed that a change to a bug that was subsequently reverted could be deemed a mistake and was an action no one really needed to know about. As is his habit, mpt opened a bug (164196) with the suggestion that corrected actions not generate email.
So if Alice is assigned to a bug by mistake and then unassigned within five minutes no email is generated. Likewise, if a tag is added but then quickly removed the action does not cause any email to be sent.
Note that avoiding email requires that the action be undone, not just fixed. By that I mean the bug must be returned to the original state to be recognized as an undoing. So if you assign Alice to a bug by mistake and then change that assignment to Bob then the action will not be seen as a mistake. Email will be sent notifying about both assignee changes to Alice and then to Bob.
Thanks to Gary and Danilo for the fix.
Launchpad read-only 08.00 UTC 6th April
Published by Matthew Revell in Notifications
Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only, with other aspects offline, for around 90 minutes from 08.00 UTC on the 6th April 2011.
Starts: 08.00 UTC 6th April 2011
Expected to end by: 09.30 UTC 6th April 2011
This is to allow for a structural update to Launchpad’s database.
Two months of squads: reviews and prospects
Published by Francis J. Lacoste March 18, 2011 in General
Launchpad has been operating in the squad structure for two months now. From my point of view, things have been going very well.
We are making steady progress on fixing timeouts, OOPSes, regressions and other operational issues.
The blue squad switched to maintenance after completing the ‘daily build’ project. The orange squad should follow-up soon once they complete the ‘sharing translations upstreams translations in Ubuntu’ project.
The cross-domain pollination is paying off. Having the API expert working as part of the squad finishing off the ‘daily builds’ work resulted in a long-due overhaul of our AJAX infrastructure. See the drive-by ajaxification of the blueprint page for the results! We saw similar things happen on the orange squad where the knowledge around the job system was put to good use.
I’ve got a lot of good feedback from developers who enjoy the enhanced focus they get in this new configuration.
As expected, the pace is picking up as the new squads learn to operate better together. The average of bugs closed per week went from 63 to 84.
At the last Thunderdome (whole Launchpad team in person-meeting) where we kicked off the reorg, I issued a challenge: by the next Thunderdome (scheduled for the last week of June) we should:
- have no timeouts with a cut-off at 9s;
- have an empty critical bugs queue;
- be on our way to delivering new features within 45 days on average
The next Thunderdome is now 3 months away. How are we doing?
Yesterday, Robert announced that the timeout was lowered to 11s. That means we have 2 seconds left to go! Looks like this is going well.
On the second point, we have today 224 open critical bugs on the Launchpad project. We started at 264. So on the surface, it’s not going well. The trick here is that there were a lot of issues that weren’t on the list. So we kept finding new issues as we fixed some, giving an impression of stasis. Over the last two weeks though, we have seen a constant drop in the queue length, so I hope that all issues are now recorded and that we are on are way to burning this queue down. The fact that we are now closing 34 of those per week on average (over 21 per week when we started) gives me comfort. We need to make that number go down by 16 each week to reach our goal. So it seems well within reach!
The last one is more challenging. We have a big structural constraint that would make it hard to achieve a cycle time of 45 days on new features: our DB deployment story. Most feature will require two DB patch iterations and we deploy those every 30 days. Nonetheless, we could read this goal as getting slots free on our ‘Next’ queue. That means finishing off everything that we have in progress plus some things that we haven’t started yet. We have some big items on there. Things like derived distributions and getting our bug privacy manageable. That’s where our real challenge lie! I’m looking forward to see how this will go.
Launchpad needs a command line
Published by Martin Pool in clients
Launchpad has a web UI, an email interface, and a ReST API that exposes every object in the database.
There are also a bunch of client programs, command line and graphical, that talk to Launchpad to do various things.
What we don’t yet have, and what I think would be great, is a systematic client that lets you manipulate
everything from the command line. There’s some code that starts towards this in Hydrazine, lptools and others, but I think having just a single tool that eventually does everything would be more discoverable and avoid unnecessary fragmentation or duplication.
(That’s not to say there’s not room for others that are guis, that are specialized to particular projects or that encapsulate a lot of policy or opinion about what they’re doing.)
So dobey and I have agreed to gradually merge hydrazine into lptools, and with other people to work towards making lptools cover everything you can do through the web UI or the API. If you have scripts you’ve written yourself, perhaps you’d like to merge them in.
pad.lv: short Launchpad URLs
Published by Martin Pool in Cool new stuff
Short story: http://pad.lv/12345 takes you to bug 12345, and pad.lv describes more abbreviations.
Sometimes you’d like to point people to an interesting bug in a project that uses Launchpad, like bug 685380 (that ‘1’ and ‘l’ may need to be more distinct in the new Ubuntu Font).
Typing out https://launchpad.net/bugs/685380 is a bit tedious, and it uses up a fair bit of space in a microblog entry. You can use any of innumerable URL-shortening services, but then the URL’s opaque; which is a shame since it really just wants to represent a 6-digit number.
Therefore: pad.lv (pad love), transparent short URLs for bugs, and other things including projects, people, bug-filing forms, packages, and more.
Maybe someone would like to make bookmarklets that generate these links, or add them into the Launchpad UI?
Thanks to Latvia for letting us use a fraction of their domain name space!
Launchpad Package Upload Improvements
Published by Julian Edwards March 10, 2011 in Cool new stuff
Launchpad has an anonymous FTP server that people use to upload source packages to Ubuntu and their PPAs. When Launchpad processes the upload it does a huge number of checks, one of which is verifying the GPG signature on the upload’s .changes file.
One of the problems with this is that if there’s a problem with the signature, or there is no signature at all, Launchpad simply throws the upload away as it cannot be sure who uploaded the package. If it tried to send an email it would also quickly become a spam vector! (See bug 374019)
In today’s release, there is a brand new FTP server that will do preliminary GPG signature checks right in the FTP session itself. If you upload a package that is not signed properly, you’ll see a message that looks like this:
Uploading to launchpad (via ftp to ppa.launchpad.net):
Uploading hello_2.5-1ubuntu1.dsc: done.
Uploading hello_2.5-1ubuntu1.diff.gz: done.
Uploading hello_2.5-1ubuntu1_source.changes: 1k/2k550 (‘Changes file must be signed with a valid GPG signature: Verification failed 3 times: [“(7, 8, u\’Bad signature\’)”, “(7, 8, u\’Bad signature\’)”, “(7, 8, u\’Bad signature\’)”] ‘,): Permission denied.
Note: This error might indicate a problem with your passive_ftp setting.
Please consult dput.cf(5) for details on this configuration option.
which means you get immediate feedback instead of your upload disappearing entirely!
As a bonus, this new FTP server also fixes another long-standing bug where uploads would hang with 1k left to go.
This checking is not available on the SFTP service yet, but we hope to implement that in the near future.
Launchpad read-only 09.00 UTC 10th of March 2011
Published by Matthew Revell March 8, 2011 in Notifications
Unfortunately, we have to move this week’s Launchpad database update. The previously announced service interruption due on Wednesday the 9th of March will now take place on Thursday the 10th of March.
Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only, with other aspects offline, for around 90 minutes from 09.00 UTC on the 10th of March 2011.
Starts: 09.00 UTC 10th March 2011
Expected back by: 10.30 UTC 10th March 2011
I’m sorry for the short notice of this change. One of our operational sysadmin team is ill, meaning that we won’t have cover during the time that we had originally planned.
Other ways to get Launchpad status information
For all the latest status information about Launchpad, see our identi.ca or Twitter feeds.
To receive email about major Launchpad service disruptions, such as this, join the launchpad-announce list.
