SFTP uploads to PPAs!
Published by Matthew Revell July 7, 2010 in Cool new stuff, PPA
You can now use SFTP to upload source packages to your Personal Package Archive!
If you’re already familiar with uploading to a PPA, all you need to do is ensure your dput.cf includes the following:
method = sftp
login = <your Launchpad account name>
If you’re new to PPAs, but already know how to create packages for Ubuntu, take a look at our guide.
UPDATED: Launchpad read-only 23.00 UTC 6th July
Published by Matthew Revell June 28, 2010 in Notifications
This replaces the previously announced period of unavailability for the 1st of July.
Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only, with other aspects offline, for around 90 minutes from 23.00 UTC on the 6th of July 2010.
This is to allow for the release of the latest Launchpad code.
Starts: 23.00 UTC 6th July 2010
Expected back online: 00.30 UTC 7th July 2010
Take the Launchpad user survey!
Published by Matthew Revell June 23, 2010 in General
There are all sorts of different ways in which we in Canonical’s Launchpad team keep in touch with people who use Launchpad: informal conversations on IRC, attending Ubuntu Developer Summits, formal user research and so on.
We want to hear from as many people who use Launchpad as possible. To help get there, I’ve created a survey with five questions. Tell us what you like about Launchpad, what you don’t and what sort of work you do in Launchpad:
Take the Launchpad user survey!
Meet Steve Kowalik
Published by Matthew Revell June 21, 2010 in Meet the devs
Steve Kowalik recently joined the Soyuz part of the Launchpad team at Canonical, so I asked him the, by now familiar, questions!
Matthew: What were you doing before you joined the Launchpad team?
Steve: I worked on the Ubuntu Mobile team for 2.5 years before switching to the Launchpad team to work on Soyuz.
Matthew: Can we see something that you’ve worked on from that time?
Steve: You sure can. The images and large parts of the integration work for Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 and Ubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 were done by me. I was also responsible for image builds for the three ARM sub-architectures for the 9.10 release.
Matthew: Where do you work?
Steve: I work from my apartment in Sydney, Australia.
Matthew: What can you see from your office window?
Steve: Another apartment block, so not the most glamorous of settings. From the other side of my apartment, I can see the local river. So it depends on the definition of office, if it’s my “office” or the balcony I work from on summer days.
Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?
Steve: I worked at a company in Burwood, NSW specializing in satellite communications, and worked on supporting and developing their in-house Debian-derived distribution.
Matthew: How did you get into free software?
Steve: I became interested in Linux when I was in high school, after I came across the term and researched it on the Internet. I started running it in 1999, and switched to Debian from Red Hat in 2000. I became a Debian Developer in 2001, and switched to Ubuntu in mid 2005.
Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Steve: I believe pragmatism is more important, as it allows people to use hard data to define the problem or solution space, and work within its boundaries.
Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Steve: I’ve had a large number of patches and changes in Ubuntu, some in Debian, and I’ve written a Debian package checker from scratch, called Linda. I’ve been involved in free software for over ten years now.
Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Steve: You can now upload packages to PPAs and Ubuntu via SFTP! As an added bonus, I wrote the support for it in Launchpad.
Matthew: Is there anything in particular you plan to work on while you’re with Launchpad?
Steve: I plan on helping to make Soyuz more stable, more feature-ful and hopefully, faster.
Matthew: Okay, Kiko‘s special question! You’re at your computer, you reach for your wallet: what are you most likely to be doing?
Steve: I’m either paying a bill, or buying something online.
Faster pages
Published by Curtis Hovey June 11, 2010 in General
I am happy to report that caching rules I put in place on many pages last week are effective. I did not want to announce that pages were faster until I could see read a week of oops reports to verify that the slow pages owned by the Launchpad registry team were no longer listed as problems. I am honestly surprised that all the slow pages I changes are not listed. I expected to make a reduction in timeouts between 50% and 80%. This looks like a 100% success. I know it is not 100%, but I think this means that milestone, series, and project pages load quicker and you are seeing fewer timeouts.
Launchpad pages now have access to memcached to store fragments of pages. Parts of pages that are costly to generate are cached for minutes or hours depending on how often the data can change. In the case of distro series pages, architecture data changes every few months so the cache rules are 6 hours. Milestone pages were a challenge to cache. Active milestones cache bugs for 10 minutes, Inactive milestones cache for 3 hours. The milestone summary of statuses and assignments cache for 1 hour. If you do not know this, you may suspect there is a bug in launchpad, or wonder if you did not update a bug as you thought. We need a mechanism to expire change when data is changed.
We are now adding cache rules to other pages to improve page load times.
Change to 2nd June Launchpad read-only/down-time
Published by Matthew Revell June 1, 2010 in Notifications
We’ve had to alter the times between which Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only, while everything else is offline, for the release of Launchpad 10.05.
New start time: 11.00 UTC 2nd June 2010
New end time: 14.00 UTC 2nd June 2010
UPDATED: Launchpad read-only 08.00-11.00 UTC 2nd June 2010
Published by Matthew Revell May 31, 2010 in Notifications
Launchpad Montreal meet-up
Published by Matthew Revell May 25, 2010 in General
Come and meet some of the Launchpad team next week in Montreal!
From around 7.30pm on Wednesday the 2nd of June, we’re going to be at Réservoir (map), which is at:
9 DuLuth Est.
Montréal
H2T 3L4
I’ll be there, along with Launchpad team leader Francis Lacoste, Launchpad Strategist Jonathan Lange and Launchpad Ombudsman Karl Fogel. Come join us for a drink and a chat.
Launchpad meet-up Brussels 12th May
Published by Matthew Revell May 6, 2010 in General
Some of the Launchpad team will be in Brussels next week for UDS, so it’s a great opportunity to head to a bar and meet up with other Launchpad users 🙂
Come join us at Delirium Café from around 8pm on Wednesday the 12th of May. Look out for the people in Launchpad and Ubuntu t-shirts.
- What: Launchpad meet-up
- Where: Delirium Café, Impasse de la Fidélité, 4A – 1000 Brussels
- When: From around 8pm on Wednesday the 12th of May
Mail me if you have any questions or just to say you’re coming!
The Economist and Launchpad
Published by Matthew Revell May 5, 2010 in Projects
The online team at The Economist recently set up a Launchpad project, using a commercial subscription. I asked Mark Theunissen, from The Economist Group, about their plans.
Mark: We’re migrating the existing Economist.com stack from Coldfusion/Oracle to a LAMP stack running Drupal. At present, we’re about half way through — if you visit a blogs page, channel page, or comments page they will be served from Drupal, but the home page and actual articles are still served from Coldfusion. There’s a migration and syncronisation process happening in the background between Oracle and MySQL.
Matthew: Is much of your web infrastructure based on open source software? If so, what?
Mark: Our new stack sure is! 🙂 We run almost all open source, in fact I can’t think of anything that isn’t.
- Redhat Linux servers throughout (not Ubuntu, unfortunately).
- MySQL enterprise database.
- PHP 5.
- Varnish HTTP accelerator.
- Drupal content management system. Actually, a distribution called Pressflow.
- Memcached for caching.
- BCFG2 for configuration management.
- The Grinder for load testing.
Matthew: Do you customise much of that?
Mark: We do, yes. We’ve sponsored or contributed patches that have mostly been for Drupal but also made their way into Varnish & BCFG2. We use Pressflow, and our changes go there first and often get back ported into core Drupal. Our policy is to open source as much as humanly possible!
Matthew: And, of course, I’d love to know what made The Economist choose Launchpad.
Mark: We chose Launchpad for its usability, mostly the workflow around reviewing code (merge proposals). It provides excellent tools for managing distributed teams, and we are a very large distributed team, with three locations where development is occurring on either side of the Atlantic.
The integration with Bazaar is great, and we are going to consider moving our bug tracker to Launchpad too at some time in the future.
Matthew: Thanks Mark!
