Launchpad read-only 09.00 UTC 11th February 2011
Published by Francis J. Lacoste February 10, 2011 in General
In twelve hours from this posting, Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only, with other aspects offline, for around 90 minutes. This is to allow us to make an update to the structure of the Launchpad database. This replaces the previous read-only period announced for Feb 10th 2011 23.00 UTC.
Starts: 09.00 UTC 11th of February 2011
Expected back by: 10.30 UTC 11th of February 2011
There is a slim possibility that the Launchpad’s web interface will be completely unavailable. Because of circumstances beyond our control, the recovery procedure from the aborted roll-out wasn’t able to be completed within the time frame necessary for the previously scheduled window. In the case where it wouldn’t be complete for that next window, we will still complete the roll-out by taking the web interface offline.
I’m sorry that we’ve had to delay this period of service disruption on such short notice.
Launchpad read-only 23.00 UTC 10th February 2011
Published by Matthew Revell in Notifications
In thirteen hours from this posting, Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only, with other aspects offline, for around 90 minutes. This is to allow us to make an update to the structure of the Launchpad database.
Starts: 23.00 UTC 10th of February 2011
Expected back by: 00.30 UTC 11th of February 2011
We tried to make this release yesterday. Unfortunately, we came across a problem during the roll-out and had to stop what we were doing in order to find a fix.
I’m sorry that we’ve had to arrange a second period of service disruption in two days.
Launchpad offline 23:00UTC 9 February
Published by Martin Pool February 9, 2011 in General
Launchpad will be offline for about 90 minutes while we roll out some changes to the database and to code hosting.
Should launchpadlib default to staging?
Published by Martin Pool in API, Coming changes
Launchpad API client developers: have your say in bug 714043 on whether launchpadlib should connect by default to Launchpad’s staging server (so data is discarded), or to real Launchpad.
Bug expiry reactivated
Published by Martin Pool in Coming changes
As we foreshadowed last October, bug expiry is now active again.
Bugs that are marked Incomplete and that haven’t been touched for 60 days will now start moving to the Expired state. If it turns out the bug’s still useful or valid, anyone can move it back.
We recommend people use the Incomplete state to mean: if this bug report doesn’t get more information, there’s nothing we can do with it.
This only affects projects expire incomplete bug reports setting turned on in the Configure bug tracker page.
New ‘web_link’ property on API objects
Published by Martin Pool February 7, 2011 in API, Cool new stuff
Launchpad has a REST API that exposes almost every object within Launchpad. Most of them have API URLs that closely match the human-readable URL: for instance, https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/316694 can also be obtained in machine-oriented JSON or XML form from http://api.launchpad.net/1.0/bugs/316694. (The “1.0” in that URL means this is in the 1.0 API namespace.)
Previously, many Launchpadlib clients used string transformation to get from the API URL to something they could show a human in a web browser.
We’ve just added a web_link property on all Launchpad objects, so client applications can (and should) now just use that instead. Because this is just sent in the object representation you don’t need to upgrade launchpadlib to see it.
Should bug search match target names?
Published by Robert Collins in Bug Tracking
We have a small quandry on the Launchpad development team at the moment. As bug 268508 discusses, when one searches for a bug on Launchpad we do a substring search on the names of bug targets.
For instance, searching in Ubuntu for ‘gcc’ will return all bugs on the packages ‘gcc’, ‘gcc-4.4’, ‘gcc-4.3’, ‘gcc-3.3’ and so forth. Likewise search for bugs in a project group will do a similar substring search on each of the individual projects in the project group.
It turns out that doing this search is itself expensive. I asked on the Ubuntu devel list about turning it off. We would close bug 268508 and also significantly improve search performance.
However this is a possibly contentious change – there was one mail strongly in favour of the current behaviour – so I’d like to get this change proposed to a wider community.
If you’ve got a strong opinion – that the current behaviour is good, or like bug 268508 describes, that its a poor behaviour and we would be better off without it, then I’d love to hear from you. Just leave a comment on this post, drop me an email – robert at canonical.com – or post to the launchpad-users mailing list.
Thanks,
Rob (LP technical architect)
SourceForge code imports are disabled
Published by Francis J. Lacoste February 3, 2011 in General
Following the SourceForge compromise, the SSL certificate for SourceForge subversion changed.
A bug on their end prevents us from automatically importing from their SVN repositories.
Until that bug is resolved, all SourceForge code imports are disabled.
2011/02/14 update: We re-enabled SF code imports since the problem was fixed on their end.
Launchpad read-only 23.00 UTC 9th February 2011
Published by Matthew Revell February 1, 2011 in Notifications
Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only, with other aspects offline, for around 90 minutes from 23.00 UTC on the 9th of February 2011.
Starts: 23.00 UTC 9th of February 2011
Expected to be back to normal by: 00.30 UTC 10th of February 2011
This is to allow for an update to the structure of Launchpad’s database as part of our monthly development cycle.
Announcing Launchpad squads
Published by Francis J. Lacoste January 31, 2011 in General
We’ve made some changes to how we organise the Launchpad team!
We’re no longer divided into application-based teams (Bugs, Code, Foundations, Registry, Soyuz and Translations). Instead, we now have five cross-domain engineering squads: three focused on features and two on
maintenance.
How does this affect you?
When you want to speak to someone about a specific part of Launchpad,
whether for help, to escalate something or about an operational issue,
things have changed a little.
Specifically:
- For help and any other operational issues related to Launchpad, you should either send an email to the launchpad-users mailing list, or file a question on the Launchpad project. (Reminder: these forums are public.)
- If your request would benefit from interactive discussions, drop by in#launchpad on Freenode where one of the people working on the maintenance squads will be able to help you. If your request isn’t suitable for public consumption, you can reach the same people on the #launchpad-ops channel onthe private Canonical IRC server.
- To prioritize feature requests and to escalate other bugs, you should contact our product strategist.
- You can also always bounce ideas to the developers list.
Short-term, we also expect some churn as people are exposed to areas they weren’t used to before. But down-the-line, we’ll have much more distributed knowledge coverage across the whole application.
How the squads work
The squads will alternate between “development project” and “maintenance” modes.
The three development squads will work on longer term projects, usually resulting in new functionality. Once such a squad has finished a project they’ll swap places with one of the two maintenance squads.
Bugs, operational issues and so on will be taken care of by the maintenance squads.
Deciding which development projects to take on will remain the responsibility of our strategist (Jonathan Lange) in collaboration with the Launchpad Stakeholders group.
You can find a list of who is in each squad on our dev wiki.
Why are we doing this?
Our app-based teams served us well, but were becoming a liability:
- Many parts of Launchpad, such as Blueprint, didn’t have a dedicated team and were basically unmaintained.
- Each team was responsible for both new features within their app as wel as maintenance. That slowed both of these.
- Projects that required cross-app integration suffered from hand-off and coordination problem.
With this new structure, we expect to see:
- Better cohesion across the application, as one squad will be responsible for the implementation of new aspects across the whole application.
- Reduced cycle-time both for bug fixes and for new features as the context-switching will be removed.
It will be my pleasure to answer any questions you might have regarding this reorg.
