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!
Fixes to team contact addresses and list moderation
Published by Curtis Hovey May 4, 2010 in General
Many users have discovered that they could not reuse an email address that once belongs to a team. While Launchpad claimed the contact address was gone, that was not the case; it was hidden, never to be seen again. This is fixed. Launchpad does what it says. It removes the email address. The address can be re-registered if needed.
Many list moderators have noted that there are messages with no content in the moderation queue. This is because the messages had no text part, and that these are spam. Launchpad now discards messages without a text parts. You will not be asked to moderate a message that has no content. There is one caveate to this, content-less messages already in the moderation queue must be removed using the UI.
PPAs now 2 GiB
Published by Matthew Revell in PPA
Since we first launched Personal Package Archives, we’ve set a starting size limit of 1 GiB.
However, we’ve also said “yes” pretty much every time someone’s ask us for more space. So, seeing as how most requests have been for an increase to 2 GiB, we’ve gone ahead and upgraded every PPA to a minimum of 2 GiB. If you already have a larger allowance, it’ll stay in place.
Ubuntu package suggestions
Published by Curtis Hovey in General
The Ubuntu packages portlet lists the most recent project packages in Ubuntu’s main archive. But there are thousands of Ubuntu packages that are not linked to a registered Launchpad project. The links are needed to forward bugs upstream, sync translations, and get the latest project code. The portlet now suggests unlinked packages.
You can help Ubuntu and the project by selecting the right package. There are many cases where the project’s name is different from the Ubuntu package, and you can search for an alternate package. You can also state that the project is not packaged in Ubuntu.
After the project is linked to an Ubuntu package, it is possible to link it to other project packages from the All packages page. You can also do this from the project’s series pages.
Update: Have a look at the Gedit Developer Plugins project’s overview page for an example.
Easier project configuration
Published by Curtis Hovey in General
Projects get an improved “Get Involved” portlet. This portlet provided links to create projects artefacts like bugs and branches. It was never clear though how to enable these links. Privileged users like project owners will see links to configure Launchpad applications. The portlet also call attention to applications that are not configured.
The first use of the not configured state is the project branch. Contributors cannot submit code if Launchpad does not know the series branch, and most importantly, communities like Ubuntu need access to the project’s focus of development. The new Configure (project|series) branch form allows you to setup an code import and link the branch to the series.
Automatic generation of translation templates
Published by Данило Шеган in Translations
Last year, we integrated Launchpad Translations with Launchpad’s code hosting, meaning you could import both translations and templates from a Bazaar branch and also export translations to a branch.
Even at the time, we knew that the story wasn’t complete: you still had to somehow generate your translation templates (in the form of GNU gettext’s .pot files) and get them into your Bazaar branch before people could start translating your project in Launchpad.
However, we also knew that automatically generating translation templates was a big task.
Now, though, I’m pleased to say that Launchpad can automatically generate the templates on your behalf.
How to get it all set up for your project?
Automatic translation template generation relies on something called intltool. You’ll need to be familiar with intltool before you can get started with automatic template generation.
You first need to enable your branches for intltool and then set up a translation template import fromn the Bazaar branch that is linked to your project’s release series.
This means that, provided your branch has proper structure, you don’t even have to keep the POT file committed anymore (as a matter of fact, it’s better if you don’t). If your branch is not recognized as intltool branch, everything will keep working as before.
At this time, limits to what branches we consider intltool based are pretty strict: it has to have a POTFILES.in file in each of the template subdirectories, and be able to derive the domain name from Makevars DOMAIN variable or Makefile.in.in, configure.ac or configure.in gettext_PACKAGE variable (with very limited substitution supported). This will be further improved in the future, but plan is to support much more different layouts than just the intltool one.
We’ll be writing more about how to make the most of this in the coming weeks.
Feature Friday: the bug activity log
Published by Matthew Revell April 30, 2010 in Bug Tracking, Feature Friday
When you’re new to a bug report that’s already had quite a bit of activity, it can take a few minutes to get a hang of what’s been happening.
Launchpad gives you a shortcut that lets you quickly see the history of the bug: the bug activity log.
Let’s take a look at a bug I’ve been working on recently: bug 544799. While the main bug page gives you the current description, comment history and details of status changes, you can get a concise yet comprehensive overview of the bug’s history by following the See full activity log link.
So, when you need to get up to speed on a bug report, head for the activity log.
