Launchpod episode 14: more on the Drupal modules
Published by Matthew Revell December 15, 2008 in Podcast
Launchpod: the Launchpad team podcast!
Host: Matthew Revell.
Theme: Obscurity by Barry Warsaw.
Stuart Metcalfe talks about the Launchpad Drupal modules. See our original announcement for help and download links!
Meet Jonathan Lange!
Published by Matthew Revell in Meet the devs
Jonathan Lange‘s the next subject in our series of Launchpad developer interviews!
Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Jonathan: I’m on the Launchpad Code team. Most of the time I work on the SSH server and the systems that live behind it. I don’t often do stuff with the website proper.
Matthew: Can we see something in Launchpad that you’ve worked on?
Jonathan: Sure! Every time you go “bzr branch lp:some-project“, you are touching three or four subsystems that I’ve worked on. The biggest thing that I’ve worked on recently is stacked branch support for Launchpad. Finally, Launchpad can host Bazaar branches for large projects!
Matthew: Where do you work?
Jonathan: I work in a flat on the North Shore of Sydney.
Matthew: What can you see from your office window?
Jonathan: I can see a petrol station, the oxymoronically named Pacific Highway, joggers near-dying from heat exhaustion and Jacaranda trees.
Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?
Jonathan: Directly before, I worked at Divmod on their webmail software, Quotient. They were great people.
Matthew: How did you get into free software?
Jonathan: During a quest to rescue the true king from the sorcerous clutches of an evil duke, I ingested an ancient Tibetan philtre that granted me the ability to walk through walls, and compelled me to give away Python code every so often.
Actually, what happened is that a company I used to work for seconded me to the Australian Federal government. The work was so dull that at the end of each day I found myself with stacks of mental energy. For some reason, I channeled this energy into writing a unit testing framework for Twisted.
Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Jonathan: Principle. It comes first, giving scope, boundaries and purpose to pragmatism.
That said, one of my most deeply held principles is that things that you do a lot of should be really, really convenient. This often takes shape as a kind of pragmatism.
Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Jonathan: Yes!
I work on Twisted, although less now that Launchpad keeps me so busy. I also work occasionally on bzr-loom, and dabble with a bunch of projects that enhance unit testing in Python — see https://launchpad.net/pyunit-friends
Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Jonathan: If you are working on a Bazaar branch, and do “bzr commit --fixes lp:12345” and then push that branch up to Launchpad, Launchpad will make a link between that branch and bug 12345.
This could be a lot cooler. Martin A and I have some ideas about how we can integrate this more tightly with the code review system, for example.
Matthew: Have you ever seen Harold Bishop in the flesh?
Jonathan: I don’t know who he is. Oh wait is he that guy from Neighbours?
I haven’t seen him, but once I got served at a bar by Will from Home and Away — does that count?
Matthew: Yes. Yes it does.
Okay, Kiko‘s special question! You’re at your computer, you reach for your wallet: what are you most likely to be doing?
Jonathan: Most recently, it’s been because I signed up to EC2 so I could run tests without buying another computer. Normally though, I’m buying books. Generally non fiction ones, because I’d hate to deprive myself of the pleasure of walking around a bookstore for hours.
Offline 22.00 – 23.00 UTC 17th December 2008
Published by Matthew Revell December 12, 2008 in Notifications
Launchpad will be unavailable for around an hour on Wednesday the 17th December while we roll-out the code for our 2.1.12 release.
Going offline: 22.00 UTC 17th December 2008
Expected back before: 23.00 UTC 17th December 2008
Keep watching here for the release announcement.
Launchpad now on Twitter and identi.ca!
Published by Matthew Revell December 11, 2008 in General
You can now follow Launchpad news and other updates through Twitter and identi.ca!
For news and status updates, take a look at:
Brad‘s also running an experiment using TwitterFeed to give us:
TwitterFeeds takes the Atom feed of all bug reported against the Launchpad project and turns it into a stream of microblog posts.
Putting your project’s bugs into identi.ca or Twitter
If you track your project’s bugs in Launchpad, you can also turn them into an indeti.ca or Twitter stream. Similarly, you can create a stream of your project’s code branches, latest revisions or announcements!
Here’s what you need to do:
Step 1: Create an identi.ca or Twitter account — something like yourprojectbugs.
Step 2: Visit your project’s overview page in Launchpad and copy the relevant Atom feed URL.
Step 3: Log into TwitterFeed using your OpenID.
Step 4: Give TwitterFeed the Atom feed and your identi.ca or Twitter account details.
And you’re done!
Let us know how you find our first steps in microblogging Launchpad.
Update: The instructions above now cover using TwitterFeed with laconi.ca based services, such as identi.ca. It’s also worth noting that TwitterFeed supports a maximum of five updates every 30 mins so this may not be ideal if you want to ensure you get comprehensive coverage.
Bug info plugin for Thunderbird
Published by Matthew Revell in Bug Tracking
If you manage bug mail using Thunderbird, you may find Fabrice DesrĂ©’s Bugmail plugin useful.
It fetches the bug’s status, and displays it in a small pane above the email body, whenever it comes across bug mail from Launchpad, Bugzilla, Trac and Flyspray. In the case of Launchpad, it fetches the bug’s status from its Atom feed.
Thanks Fabrice!
New Launchpad plugins for Drupal
Published by Matthew Revell December 9, 2008 in Cool new stuff
Free software development is an essentially social activity and we’ve built Launchpad to help those interactions — both between people and projects — along the way.
By working on free software through Launchpad you build a picture not only of what you’ve done — reporting bugs, creating branches of code, etc. — but your team memberships can also show what roles you have in different free software communities.
Part of what we’ve been doing recently is to open Launchpad to make it far easier to use that information elsewhere; in particular, the web services API, the bug tracker plugin API and Launchpad becoming an OpenID provider.
Today we’re releasing two modules for Drupal 5.x under the AGPL:
- openid-launchpad: delegate your Drupal site’s user authentication to Launchpad
- openid-teams: assign Drupal roles to logged-in users based on their membership of specific Launchpad teams.
Using these modules, you can create a Drupal site that makes use of each person’s participation in your community, as reflected in Launchpad. For example, if you want to allow only members of a core development team to post release announcements to your project website all you need do is create a Drupal role with those permissions and then assign it to the Launchpad team of your project’s developers.
The Ubuntu Fridge news site is one of the first sites to use the modules. It passes user authentication to Launchpad and also grants an editor role to members of the Ubuntu Fridge Editors team in Launchpad.
To use the modules you’ll need to be running Drupal 5.x and also be using our modified version of the Drupal OpenID module (GPL). Full setup details are available in our help guide.
There’s more about both modules and you can report any bugs in Launchpad (openid-teams and openid-launchpad). If you use either of the modules, let us know how you get on!
Update: We’re working on support for Drupal 6.x. You can follow the progress by watching the openid-teams and openid-launchpad branches.
Launchpod episode 13: bug tracker plugin API
Published by Matthew Revell December 4, 2008 in Podcast
Launchpod: the Launchpad team podcast!
Hosts: Matthew Revell and Graham Binns.
Theme: Obscurity by Barry Warsaw.
- 01.00: Some of the Launchpad team will be at the Ubuntu Developer Summit starting the 8th December. Graham talks a little about what he’ll be doing.
- 03.42: Announcing the Launchpad bug tracker plugins API! Create your own plugin to enable the bug tracker of your choice to communicate directly with Launchpad. Read more.
- 11.48: Welcome to Michael Nelson, who is the latest member of Launchpad’s Soyuz team. The Soyuz chaps look after PPAs and other packaging in Launchpad.
Announcing the Launchpad bug plugin API spec
Published by Graham Binns in Bug Tracking, Cool new stuff
A while ago we announced the beta versions of the Launchpad plugins for Trac and Bugzilla. These allow Launchpad to sync not just bug statuses but also comments and, eventually, whole bug reports with the remote bug trackers that have them installed, bi-directionally. The practical upshot of this is that upstream projects that don’t use Launchpad for bug tracking can install one of these plugins and never again have to worry about not seeing bugs that people file using Launchpad but don’t forward upstream.
We in the Launchpad team realise, of course, that Bugzilla and Trac aren’t the only two bug trackers in the world. A project that uses Mantis, for example, may want its bug tracker to interact with Launchpad in the same way that Bugzilla and Trac now can. Unfortunately we can’t develop a plugin for every bug tracker out there as we don’t have the resources or the in-depth knowledge of those trackers’ internals necessary to be able to do so.
To make it possible for anyone to develop a plugin for any bug tracker, we’ve now opened up our Plugin API spec. The spec details all the APIs that need to be implemented for Launchpad to be able to sync bi-directionally with a remote bug tracker. It’s pretty detailed, and we’ve rolled into it our experiences in developing the Bugzilla and Trac plugins so as to make sure that new plugins don’t repeat the issues that we came across when we started interacting with the first bug trackers to install those plugins.
Once you’ve written an API plugin for your bug tracker of choice you can contact us by filing a question against Launchpad Bugs to let us know about it. We’ll then work to write the code on the Launchpad side that will interact with the API you’ve written. Once that’s done we’ll continue to work with you to iron out any bugs that we may come across.
I’m looking forward to seeing your plugins!
Passionate about bug tracking? We’re hiring!
Published by Matthew Revell in We're hiring!
Hate bugs? Want to make it easier for free software projects to fight them? If so, there may be a place on the Launchpad team for you.
We’re looking for a developer to join the team that works on Launchpad’s bug tracker. There are a few things we’re looking for in our new team-mate. Most importantly, you should be passionate both about free software and helping projects find better ways to track bugs.
One of the existing Launchpad Bugs developers — Graham Binns — has a good way of summarising what he’d like to see in his new colleague:
I’d rather work with someone who looks at a feature and says “that’s cool but it will cause these problems for our users” than with someone who says “wow, that must have been complex to code, cool”.
If you live and breath Python, love free software, have strong experience hacking on bug trackers and have a string of successful projects behind you, take a look at the full job description. If you’re successful, you’ll be a joining fun, skilled and highly motivated team. You’ll also get a grilling from me for our Meet the devs feature đŸ™‚
Meet Henning Eggers
Published by Matthew Revell December 2, 2008 in Meet the devs
Henning Eggers is the most recent member of the Launchpad Translations team, working with Danilo and Jeroen. Let’s find out a bit more about him.
Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Henning: I am a software developer on the Translations team. So far I have worked a lot on the importing and approval code. As of last week I am also the QA contact for our team.
Matthew: Can we see something in Launchpad that you’ve worked on?
Henning: Not yet, unless you are a member of the rosetta-experts team … đŸ˜‰
Matthew: Where do you work?
Henning: Pinneberg, 30 km north-west of Hamburg, Germany. Hamburg is close to the North Sea, which is about as far away from Bavaria and Munich as you can get in Germany. I do not own any Lederhosen nor do I know anybody that does.
Matthew: What can you see from your office window?
Henning: I am on the fifth (or sixth, depending on where you are from) floor and I see a tree with a magpie’s nest in it (no birds currently). Beyond that the “skyline” of central Pinneberg (population of 35000).
Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?
Henning: I was self-employed doing free-lance work for several customers but I had one big customer that also let me have a desk in their building. I’d been working there for 6 years (with a break) until I came here. I programmed in C, C++, Java, PHP and Python (of course), mostly network-related stuff and also some real-time data-processing lately. I was also one of the Linux experts in the company.
Matthew: How did you get into free software?
Henning: As a Linux user, really. Kernel 0.99pl13 was my starting point when I used several computers in my universities data center to copy Slackware onto a pile of floppy disks. Compiling the kernel was an over-nighter back then although I had an excessive 16 MB of RAM on my 386…
Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Henning: I never got to be involved much in writing free software before joining Launchpad, I am sorry.
Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about?
Henning: You don’t have to do your translations on-line. You can download them, edit them off-line and then re-upload them. Although, once our user interface is all ajaxy, nobody may want to do that any more…
Matthew: What is the deal with German people loving David Hasselhoff?
Henning: David who?
Matthew: Kiko‘s special question! You’re at your computer, you reach for your wallet: what are you most likely to be doing?
Henning: Using my credit card to buy tickets, memberships, software or something like that. I also use it to mange my bank account and transfer money after a successful eBay hunt.
