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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.

Mail me if you have any questions or just to say you’re coming!

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The Economist and Launchpad

Published by Matthew Revell May 5, 2010 in Projects

Economist logoThe 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.

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Easier project configuration

Published by Curtis Hovey in General

Project Get Involved portlet 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.

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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.

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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.

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Launchpad read-only 09.00-11.00 UTC 4th May 2010

Published by Matthew Revell April 28, 2010 in Notifications

Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only (other aspects such as PPAs, the email interface and the API will be offline) for two hours from 09.00 UTC on Tuesday the 4th May 2010.

Going offline: 09.00 UTC 4th May 2010
Expected back: 11.00 UTC 4th May 2010

This is for the roll-out of our Launchpad 10.04 code. Details of the release will be available on this blog following the roll-out!

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Direct translations imports for Ubuntu

Published by Данило Шеган in Translations

The last few months we’ve been doing a lot of work to enable direct import of translations from different upstream VCS systems. For now, we’ve focused on getting one very important case right first (GNOME), and then we’ll extend it to supporting other upstreams as well.

How are we going to do it? First off, we’ve split it all into two separate stages:

For some upstreams, getting them into Launchpad is trivial: they might already be hosted in Launchpad. For majority of them, however, it means pulling from different VCS systems. Thanks to Launchpad Code and Bazaar teams, getting the code in the form of bazaar branch is not that big a deal. However, when pulling translations from a VCS instead of getting them from tarballs means one slight complication. Translation templates (POT files) won’t be there, and we’ll have to regenerate them.

Regenerating templates differs from project to project. And doing it should be considered an unsafe operation. So, in the first step we are only going to support intltool-based modules, and generation of templates will happen inside a sandboxed environment. This will enable us to import upstream translations directly into read-only Launchpad projects: this is marked with green-coloured arrows on the diagram.

After that is done, we’ll start pushing all these translations directly into Ubuntu (blue-coloured arrows), minimizing the time it takes for translations to get from upstream translators to Ubuntu users.

I’ve written a more thorough explanation in my personal blog, so check it out.

Parts of this will be rolled out this cycle, but more will come in the coming months.

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