2

File downloads on project overview pages

Published by Matthew Revell March 28, 2008 in Cool new stuff

After all the work that’s gone into a release, you want to get your software out to users.

One way is to use Launchpad to make your release files available for download. Now, Launchpad makes it even easier for users to get the files from your latest release, by listing them on your project’s overview page.

Let’s take a look at the Bazaar project, as an example:

Files for download on the bzr project overview page

Here you can see files from Bazaar’s recent 1.3 release.

To distribute your project’s files through Launchpad, first you need to register a series and then register a release on the series overview page.

Once you’re on the release page, in Launchpad, there’s a link to upload files.

There are a few things to bear in mind when uploading files. They should be:

Let us know how you get on using Launchpad to distribute your project files.

0

New branch listing pages

Published by Matthew Revell in Cool new stuff

We’ve given branch listing pages a major overhaul, giving you more information about each commit.

In particular, the start of the commit message is quoted in the Last commit column, with the full thing available when you hover your mouse over it. If the author’s email address is registered in Launchpad, their name is hyperlinked to their Launchpad profile page.

Take a look at the Bazaar branch list page for an example.

0

Offline 28th March 08 00:00 – 02:00 UTC

Published by Matthew Revell March 27, 2008 in Notifications

We’re releasing Launchpad 1.2.3 in the early hours, UTC, of the 28th March 2008.

Offline from: 00.00 UTC
Expected back: 02.00 UTC

1

Using Launchpad accounts to manage your local ssh logins: launchpadduser.py

Published by kiko March 22, 2008 in General

Glyph posted an interesting script to the launchpad-users mailing list that I thought was definitely worth sharing:

Quite often, I’ve discovered that I want to add someone (who already has an account on launchpad) to my system so they can log in and attach to my ‘screen’ session; however, I will inevitably screw up typing in the finger information, setting permissions on their .ssh directory, assigning them a bogus password, etc. Here’s a simple Python script that will add a user to your system with the same username as on Launchpad, and with their SSH keys already set up so they can log in, but no system password.

You can download the script from http://people.ubuntu.com/~kiko/launchpadduser.py.

It requires adduser, wget and python. You’re expected to run this as root, so the usual warnings apply, but it’s simple enough for you to audit on your own. And there is no error handling! A usage example:

root@beetle:~# python launchpadduser.py kiko
Adding user `kiko' ...
Adding new user `kiko' (1012) with group `users' ...
Creating home directory `/home/kiko' ...
Copying files from `/etc/skel' ...
--09:43:36--  https://launchpad.net/~kiko/+sshkeys
           => `/home/kiko/.ssh/authorized_keys'
Resolving launchpad.net... 91.189.90.211
Connecting to launchpad.net|91.189.90.211|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 Ok
Length: 860 [text/plain]

100%[=============================================>] 860           --.--K/s             

09:43:38 (9.49 MB/s) - `/home/kiko/.ssh/authorized_keys' saved [860/860]

And presto:

kiko@anthem:~$ ssh beetle
Linux beetle 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 i686
kiko@beetle:~$

3

Logo competition closing soon!

Published by Matthew Revell March 17, 2008 in General

This past few weeks, we’ve had a whole load of high quality entries to our logo competition. We’re heading fast towards the 31st March deadline, so if you want to take part you’d best fire up Inkscape pretty sharpish!

Back in January I shared a couple of the entries we’d had at that time. As a bit of inspiration, in case your arty side is twitching, here are some of the proposed logos we’ve had since.

Donn Ingle’s sixth entry to the competition introduces a touch of the natural world:

Leaf logo

Siim Sindonen’s stylised blue rockets show the community support between projects, people and teams in Launchpad:

Light blue rocket piggybacking on a darker blue rocket

Thorsten Wilms offers this shiny green rocket:

Green rockets

And Marco Tessarotto’s entry puts me in mind of Marvin the Martian but I’m not sure why:

Dark green rocket

See all the entries on our submissions page!

2

Bazaar IDE integration

Published by Matthew Revell March 6, 2008 in Bazaar, Podcast

Here on the Launchpad team we work pretty closely with the Bazaar community.

This week, Canonical‘s London HQ has been host to a Bazaar sprint. It’s been great to meet up with members of the Bazaar community from Australia, the USA, Argentina, France, the Netherlands, Hungary and the UK. I’ve been working with them on plans for a new Bazaar administrator’s guide.

I’ve also recorded a short chat with Martin Albisetti who is leading the new Bazaar IDE integration team. Martin talks about the technical and advocacy approaches they plan to take.

Listen to the interview with Martin.

0

Launchpad 1.2.2: faster PPA builds, enhanced bug subscriptions and more karma!

Published by Matthew Revell February 21, 2008 in Releases

It’s time for another Launchpad release and this is one with something for just about everyone!

There’s also exciting news for Launchpad beta testers! You can now apply to use Launchpad to run a mailing list for a team you’re involved with. Find out more about the mailing list beta.

Not a beta tester yet? Learn more about our beta programme and find out what you’re missing!

Read the full Launchpad 1.2.2 release notes.

0

February’s users meeting

Published by Matthew Revell February 20, 2008 in General

It’s coming up to the end of the month again and so it’s almost time for the Launchpad users meeting!

When: 09.00 – 10.00 27th February UTC.
Where: #launchpad-meeting on Freenode.
Find out more: Add your items to the agenda.

0

Offline 21 Feb 00.00 – 03.00 UTC

Published by Matthew Revell February 19, 2008 in Notifications

We’re releasing Launchpad 1.2.2 on 21st February. While we roll-out the code to each of Launchpad’s servers, we’ll have to take the service offline.

Goes offline: 00.00 21st February 2008 UTC
Expected back online: 03.00 21st February 2008 UTC

Keep an eye on this blog after the release to find out what’s new in 1.2.2!

We’re sorry for the downtime you’ll experience during the roll-out.

4

The Great Source Code Supermarket

Published by kiko February 13, 2008 in Bazaar, General

Launchpad is kinda hard to describe. When I’m asked what it is, I normally use three or more of the words “open source free software support project Q&A code registration bugs management listing bazaar planning hosting”. Most people make comparisons to Sourceforge, Savannah, Berlios and Google code hosting, and while those are useful, it’s only a part of the picture. The other part, which is perhaps not as well understood, is that it’s also a public project registration service, similar to Freshmeat. Well, except for a twist.

Launchpad’s source code directory

In addition to providing a project registration service open to the public for free (with probably the best Google juice out there; this has caught some people off-guard before!), Launchpad takes this to a next step, and actually provides a unified interface for interacting with each project registered. The most obvious unified service that you can use today is our code directory, which I want to introduce here.

Now Launchpad provides some key features related to source code for free software projects:

There’s a really cool thing that falls out of the combination of code imports, branch mirrors and Bazaar: you can use bzr and Launchpad to fetch any piece of software we have registered code for. And Bazaar even provides a little shortcut that makes it even easier to grab the default branch for any project: bzr branch lp:<projectname>.

An open source supermarket

The effect is that you can, right now, pull a /lot/ of software in less than 30 keystrokes, without knowing or caring about what its native version-control system is, or where it’s hosted. Want to grab the Python source code? Just do bzr branch lp:python. How about Storm? bzr branch lp:storm. In fact, there are thousands of native Bazaar branches and over one thousand imported branches. Here are just a few examples of major projects you can pull right now:

Couldn’t find a branch listed for the project you want? We can sort this out for you, too. If it’s in CVS or Subversion elsewhere, you can just follow the instructions for setting up an import. If it’s a Bazaar branch, just register it and we’ll hook it up with the project’s mainline series record.

More on project branches

If you visit https://code.launchpad.net/ you’ll notice that it has an abbreviated project cloud, which lists all the projects with branches in Launchpad. The project’s name is rendered in different sizes and intensities according to how active the actual project is; the size of the name in the cloud is defined by the number of branches that the project has, and the intensity of the tag in the cloud is determined by how recent the last commit to any active branch is. And green indicates that there’s a default branch for the project, which means that the bzr branch lp:foo abbreviation works for it. There’s a also a page with the full code cloud.

So each of those projects has active source code branches that you can pull from Launchpad using Bazaar. For instance, to check the source code for Apport, you could click on its entry in the listing and getting there you could inspect the branches available and select one of them for pulling. For instance, if you chose Will Woods’ Fedora support branch you get instructions on how to pull it: bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~wwoods/apport/fedora or even just
bzr branch lp:~wwoods/apport/fedora

Imports and today’s deliveries

Import requests are handled in a queue by Launchpad code ninjas; normally this it Michael Hudson’s responsibility but starting today I’ll be helping out too. Of the import requests I handled today, the following succeeded and are ready for grabbing in the great bzr-get-lp-colon fashion:

I’ll keep you posted on new imports as they come online. Meanwhile, go grab some branches and post some comments telling me what you think. If you have any problems or questions about our code hosting service, feel free to ask on the Launchpad code section in answers.launchpad.net.

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