Launchpad Blog

Launchpad Configuration Migration

Published by Joey Stanford April 18, 2008 in General

Hi,

Since the last Launchpad release you may have noticed a few emails and blog
posts referring to unexpected issues with Launchpad. I thought you might
like to know more about what was causing them, and how we are addressing them.

Launchpad’s operational environment is hosted on several machines in order to
provide adequate response times given our user load. Previously, we had to
maintain separate, and complex, configuration settings for each of the servers.
This was not very conducive to developing and deploying new features, nor
supporting the existing infrastructure. The situation was becoming
unmaintainable, and we had made careful plans to resolve these problems.

To address this limitation, we migrated the existing configuration settings
over to a standard, site-wide, hierarchical system. We’re confident that this
new configuration system will also provide us with a much more robust, stable
and maintainable operational environment. However, the rollout of this new
system has resulted in an undesirable level of shake-out due to the
complexities of the Launchpad services involved and the complexities of the
old configuration system.

On behalf of the entire Launchpad Development Team, I’d like to offer our
sincerest apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We ask you
for your continued understanding as we seek to improve the Launchpad service.

Joey Stanford
Launchpad Releases Team Manager

Mailing List Notifications have bad URLs

Published by Joey Stanford April 16, 2008 in Notifications

Hi Gang,

Just a quick heads up that we uncovered a problem today with Launchpad Mailing List notifications. You may have received a mailing list notification from Launchpad with a funny URL that looks like

https://xmlrpc.lp.internal/~rinchen/+editemails

These courtesy emails are normally sent out (with correct URLs) when a team you are a member of creates a new Launchpad Mailing List. The email is still valid despite the incorrect URL.

You should visit your Launchpad person page and view your email settings. At the bottom you will see “Mailing list subscriptions”. From here you can manage your Launchpad mailing list subscriptions.

Here’s a short cut to that page: https://launchpad.net/people/+me/+editemails

Sorry for the inconvenience. We should have this fixed by tomorrow.

Joey Stanford

Launchpad 1.2.3: mailing lists in Launchpad

Published by Matthew Revell March 28, 2008 in Releases

We’re proud to announce a much requested new feature as part of Launchpad 1.2.3: mailing lists in Launchpad!

If you run a team in Launchpad, you can request a mailing list straight away on your team’s overview page. Once the list is active, each team member will have the option to subscribe.

If you don’t yet run a team but you’d like to create a mailing list that wouldn’t be covered by an existing team, create a new team and then request a list.

There’s more in our guide.

And there’s plenty more going on in this release, including:

Translations can now have up to six plural forms.
Each project’s files are now available to download from its overview page.
You can search for PPAs by name and keywords.
We’ve revamped branch listing pages to give you quicker access to commit messages and author information.

As with all new software, there may still be some bugs in this new release. If you come across something that looks like a bug, please report it.

See the full Launchpad 1.2.3 release announcement.

Six plural forms in translations

Published by Matthew Revell in Cool new stuff

Up until this release (1.2.3), Launchpad Translations has supported only four plural forms. This works for many languages but has been a problem for Arabic, in particular, as it has six different plural forms.

I’m pleased to say that Launchpad now supports up to six plural forms in those languages that need them!

Mailing lists in Launchpad!

Published by Matthew Revell in Cool new stuff

Mailing lists are one of the main ways we communicate in the free software world. They’re crucial to the day to day work, as well as the planning and debate, of most projects.

Now, each Launchpad team can have its own mailing list hosted and managed by Launchpad. If you run a team in Launchpad, simply visit your team’s overview page to request your list. If you want to subscribe to a list, first join the team that owns it and then subscribe. Full details are in our guide.

Let’s look at some of what Launchpad brings to mailing lists:

Simplified administration. As someone running a list, Launchpad does everything for you: you don’t need to manage a server and there’s no mailing list software for you to patch.
Simplified subscription management. As a list subscriber, all you need are your Launchpad login details and your team memberships. Nothing more to it. Change your email address? Update it once in your Launchpad profile and it’s automatically effective for your mailing list subscriptions. To subscribe to a list, all you need is to be a member of the relevant team.
Post from any email address. You can post to your Launchpad mailing lists from any email address registered in your Launchpad profile.
Automatic archiving and distribution. Launchpad lists are automatically archived for history, in a format that is easily cataloged by search engines. Copies are also archived on mail-archive.com, a popular long-term list archive site.

The full details on creating and joining mailing lists in Launchpad are available in our guide.

File downloads on project overview pages

Published by Matthew Revell 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:

code release tarball
installer files
README or other documentation
changelog file
release notes
no more than 60MB per file.

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

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.

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

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:~$

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: