Day two – sprints and meetings
Published by Matthew Revell December 26, 2008 in 12 days of Launchpad
On the second day of Launchpad — and at this time of year when people tend to get together — we’re going to look at how Launchpad can help you organise sprints and meetings.
First off, let’s take a look at the list of all meetings tracked in Launchpad. You get an overview of what each meeting is about, along with its start time and date. Click on Entertainer May 2008 to take a look at the details of a specific event.
Now for the really interesting bit: on this event’s overview page is an excerpt from its agenda. Click on one of the agenda items and you’ll see that it’s a blueprint also registered in Launchpad. Anyone can propose a blueprint for the agenda by following the Propose for meeting agenda link on a blueprint’s page. Then it’s down to the meeting’s organiser — i.e. the person that registered it in Launchpad — to approve or decline agenda items.
There are a couple of other things to note too: it takes just a couple of clicks from the event’s overview page to register yourself as attending and, if you’re the meeting’s organiser, you can download a CSV of all the attendees.
Twelve days of Launchpad: announcements
Published by Matthew Revell December 25, 2008 in 12 days of Launchpad
Welcome to the Twelve Days of Launchpad!
From now through to January 6th we’ll look at a different Launchpad feature each day, concentrating on those that aren’t so well known.
Let’s start with announcements! Your project’s Launchpad overview page is a great place to give other Launchpad users — and thanks to some Google juice, the rest of the world — an introduction to what your project is all about.
It also gives you an effortless way to keep your community up to date. Take a look at the Pyroom text editor’s project page.
Click on any of the announcement titles and you’ll see the full news item, with an optional link to more info. Even better, Launchpad gives your project an Atom feed of all your announcements. Visit your overview page and, if you’re running Firefox, click the feed icon in the browser address bar.
To make an announcement — either for immediate publication or to go live at your chosen time — follow the Make announcement link at the bottom of the announcements section of your project’s overview page.
Drinking from the firehose
There’s an even a page and Atom feed where you can see the announcements from every project in Launchpad. What a great way to find out what’s happening in Launchpad right at that moment!
Exaile media player
Published by Matthew Revell December 19, 2008 in Projects
The Exaile media player has been attracting fans over the past couple of years. I asked the project’s founder, Adam Olsen, about the project and their use of Launchpad.
Matthew: It seems as though music players are a bit like mail clients: they’re a problem that you might think are easy to solve but, in practice, no one ever seems entirely happy with what’s available. How are the Exaile team tackling that problem?
Adam: Before I started Exaile, I was somewhat happy with Amarok. I liked most of it, however, I was using Gnome and Amarok was quite buggy at the time. I thought, “well, I’ll write a Gnome clone for it”, and that’s how it got started. Once I had all the features in that I wanted, it moved to the users to give ideas by requesting features.
Now it’s a cat and mouse game, to keep up with what users request. Can’t really give everyone what they want, but we do try.
Matthew: How many people contribute to Exaile?
Adam: There are three developers, and three or four people that contribute regularly with patches.
Matthew: What made you choose Launchpad and Bazaar for Exaile?
Adam: I chose Launchpad because I wasn’t in charge of hosting it. Prior to Launchpad, I was using trac on my own server, which eventually got hacked. Launchpad was a natural choice to me because Ubuntu was using it, and I chose Bazaar because Launchpad used it.
Matthew: Is your team PPA an important way to distribute stable Exaile release or just for test versions?
Adam: It’s to distribute stable versions of Exaile. Prior to PPA, I’d only distribute packages for different architectures when someone contributed them, but this is much easier
Matthew: What features do you feel are missing from Launchpad?
Adam: A wiki would be nice, or some sort of documentation section.
Matthew: Is there anything in Launchpad that is much harder than it should be?
Adam: Sometimes Launchpad is hard to navigate, but I think it’s because it does some things that no other projects do. Terminology is sometimes an issue, for instance, the word “driver” to describe the person (or team) that is in charge of decisions and bugs for a series is probably something that a new user hasn’t heard before, even though it does accuratly describe the purpose.
All in all, though, the documentation is good, and the community is very helpful, so it’s really not a big deal.
Matthew: Have you used merge proposals and code review in Launchpad?
Adam: Not extensively. We’ve had probably two or three merge proposals.
Matthew: Do you use the bug tracker’s ability to track one bug as it affects different projects?
Adam: Yes, if there is a bug Exaile and also another Python project that gets fixed, sometimes I’ll look through to see what they did to fix it.
Matthew: What’s next for Exaile?
Adam: Right now we’re doing a complete rewrite of the codebase that’ll allow features to be added more quickly and easily. It’s currently in a very usable state and we’ve released a beta. No word yet on when we’ll be done, but people seem to be pretty excited about it.
Matthew: Thanks Adam!
Launchpad 2.1.12: new bug tracker plugin API
Published by Matthew Revell December 18, 2008 in Releases
We’re proud to announce the release of Launchpad 2.1.12 and two exciting new ways for other services to use data in Launchpad.
Create a Launchpad plugin for your bug tracker
Launchpad can already import the status of a bug report that’s in another tracker, such as Debian’s BTS or Sourceforge.
Recently, we also announced two plugins — for Bugzilla and Trac — that enable two-way communication, starting off with sharing a bug’s comment history between those trackers and Launchpad.
We’ve published our bug plugin API on the help wiki, so now anyone can create their own plugins to enable other bug trackers to communicate directly with Launchpad.
Graham has more in his blog post.
Launchpad modules for Drupal 5.x
Building on Launchpad’s OpenID support, we’ve produced two Drupal 5.x modules that let you:
- use Launchpad to authenticate your Drupal site’s visitors
- assign Drupal roles based on someone’s Launchpad team memberships.
We’re working on support for Drupal 6.x right now.
Read more in our blog post.
Full details of 2.1.12
If you filter Launchpad bug mail, look out for a new header:
X-Launchpad-Bug-Commenters
It lists, alphabetically, everyone who has commented on the bug, including the original poster, with each name separated by spaces.
To get the full details of the Launchpad 2.1.12 release, have a look at its milestone page.
If you come across a bug, please report it!
See you next year!
We’ll be back in the new year with Launchpad 2.2.1 on the 28th January.
There are two new ways to get Launchpad news, via Twitter and identi.ca:
- http://twitter.com/launchpad_net
- http://identi.ca/launchpad
And don’t forget the Launchpad News blog!
As always, you can join us in #launchpad on Freenode and at the new home of the launchpad-users mailing list.
3Preparing for signed PPAs
Published by Matthew Revell December 17, 2008 in General
Since we introduced PPAs, we’ve had a number of requests for signed packages in archives. Up until now, when installing a package from a PPA Ubuntu has warned that it is unsigned.
So, if you want to sign packages in a PPA, what do you sign them with? We dismissed two of the most obvious ideas:
- signing with the author’s own key, as that’d mean either Launchpad storing their private key or doing away with the build part of PPAs and asking authors to upload binaries
- signing with one key for all PPAs, which is a bit meaningless.
Instead, starting this week we’re generating a unique key for each archive and then signing each build made from the time of the key’s creation. As someone downloading from a PPA, you can easily check the fingerprint on its overview page in Launchpad to ensure you’re getting what you expect.
It’ll take a while to generate all the keys; check your PPA overview page to see if your key is ready yet. In the mean time, some PPAs will have keys and others will continue to generate warnings about unsigned packages.
We’ll post more details in the new year.
2OpenTeacher
Published by Matthew Revell in Projects
Milan Boers runs the OpenTeacher project. I asked him about the project and his use of Launchpad.Matthew: Tell us about OpenTeacher and what you’re hoping to achieve.
Milan: OpenTeacher is an application that helps you learning a foreign language. You enter some words, and OpenTeacher tests if you know them. There’s project called Teach2000, but this is only available for Windows and it’s closed-source. I hope to make OpenTeacher a good (or maybe even better) alternative to Teach2000 for other platforms like Linux. OpenTeacher is written in Python and
Qt4, so it can run on many platforms.Matthew: How many people contribute to Openteacher?
Milan: Just me, but I would like to have more people contributing by adding blueprints, bug reports and patches. I’m not a python-expert, so coders are very welcome. OpenTeacher is still a very young project, so maybe it will grow later on.
Matthew: What made you choose Launchpad?
Milan: I’ve been using Ubuntu for a while now and sometimes reported bugs to other Launchpad-project, so I already knew what Launchpad was. For me it’s the ultimate place to manage a project with features like bug reporting, blueprints and code hosting. Especially the easy and clean interface is an advantage. SourceForge can learn a lot from the Launchpad interface.
Matthew: What features do you feel are missing from Launchpad?
Milan: I think the translation feature of Launchpad is a weak spot. At the moment, it’s not really easy to find the untranslated sentences. It’s possible to only view the untranslated items, but this also shows the items which already have suggestions for translations but have yet to be reviewed. I think it would be better to make it possible to show untranslated items which also don’t have any suggestions.
I also miss the feature to upload .ts files instead of .po files to be translated. Qt uses its own translation system, using .ts files.
Matthew: Is there anything in Launchpad that is much harder than it should be?
Milan: I haven’t discovered any. Every feature that I’ve seen is easy to use for developers.
Matthew: Do you interact with other projects through Launchpad?
Milan: Not at all.
Matthew: What’s next for OpenTeacher?
The next important thing is the release of the first stable version. I’ve got a big list of improvements that should be made, and I’m working hard to realize them đŸ™‚
Matthew: Thanks Milan!
0Launchpod 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!
0Meet 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.
0Offline 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 2008Keep watching here for the release announcement.
10Launchpad 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.
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