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Downtime 01.00 UTC 20th December

Published by Matthew Revell December 18, 2007 in Notifications

On the 20th December (UTC) we’re releasing Launchpad 1.1.12. During the roll-out of the new code, Launchpad will be offline for roughly ninety minutes.

Start time: 02.00 UTC 20th December 2007.
Estimated end time: 03.30 UTC 20th December 2007.

2007-12-20 00:52 – Delayed one hour

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Personal Package Archives for everyone!

Published by Matthew Revell November 25, 2007 in PPA

Over the past few months we’ve been beta-testing a new Launchpad feature that has stirred up interest right across the Ubuntu community and beyond: Personal Package Archives (PPA).

Thanks to the members of the Launchpad Beta Testers team, the beta test has been a great success and we’re now confident that Personal Package Archives are ready for everyone.

So, as of today, every Launchpad user and team can have their own Personal Package Archive!

Building and hosting Ubuntu packages

Using your PPA you can build and publish software packages for Ubuntu. They can be based on existing Ubuntu packages or you can create completely new packages of any free software project.

So, you get your own apt repository – hosted by Launchpad – that Ubuntu users can add to their sources.list. Then, they can install packages from your repository and receive updates whenever you publish them, pretty much as they would with packages in the primary Ubuntu archive.

If you’re already comfortable with creating .deb packages for Ubuntu you can get started straight away. All you need to do is:

Activate PPA

  1. Import your GPG key to your Launchpad profile.
  2. Sign the Ubuntu Code of Coduct.
  3. Click Activate PPA on your Launchpad profile page.
  4. Follow our PPA quick-start guide.

To create a PPA for a team, click “Activate PPA” on your team’s overview page.

Launchpad will build your source for both i386 and AMD64 architectures against whichever currently supported Ubuntu release you choose.

Okay, but why?

So, it’s a pretty cool feature but why would you want to use it? I’ll leave it to Kiko – Launchpad Release Manager – to explain:

“Many developers want to modify existing packages, or create new packages of their software. The PPA service allows anyone to publish a package without having to ask permission or join the Ubuntu project as a developer.

“This is a tremendous innovation in the free software community. We hope that PPA will make it easier for developers and development teams who have excellent ideas to get their work into the hands of users for testing and feedback. They also get to mix with experienced packagers to improve their skills. PPA is a build system, a publishing system and a community experience. We are also really excited to add the ability to create packages aimed at the mobile environment from launch.”

Matt Zimmerman, who most in the Ubuntu community will know as Canonical’s CTO, explained how PPA will be useful for testing experimental builds:

“Adding a new feature to a package or building it against a new version of a system library requires extensive testing. A PPA allows a developer to form a community of testers who are interested in their changes. The testing community can install the packages, run them for the test period and then remove them cleanly from their system. If the developer releases an updated version, the Ubuntu Update Manager will automatically notify those testers and enable them to update to the newer versions with a single click. This creates a very efficient environment for developers and testers to improve their favorite software.

Dive in

Join us on the launchpad-users mailing list if you have questions or want to talk with other people about how they are using PPA. We’ve also got an introductory class for PPAs at 15.00 UTC on Wednesday 28th November in Freenode’s #ubuntu-classroom.

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Launchpad 1.1.11 released!

Published by Matthew Revell in Releases

Welcome to Launchpad 1.1.11, the penultimate Launchpad release for 2007!

We have two big pieces of news this month!

So, what else is new in Launchpad 1.1.11?

Distribution Management and PPA (Soyuz)

Code Hosting

Bug Tracker

Answers

Translations

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Personal Package Archives class – 28th November

Published by Matthew Revell November 23, 2007 in PPA

Interested in creating your own Ubuntu packages using Launchpad’s Personal Package Archives?

Next week we’re holding the second of our Personal Package Archives 101 sessions. Launchpad developer Celso Providelo (cprov) and MOTU member Jordan Mantha (Laserjock) will take you through the basics of Personal Package Archives and, if there’s time, take questions.

When? 15.00 – 16.00 UTC 28th November 2007.
Where? #ubuntu-classroom on Freenode.

If there’s anything in particular you would like to see covered in the session send us a mail to feedback@launchpad.net.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Update: Take a look at our PPA quick-start guide to get up to speed before the session.

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Launchpad downtime 03.00 UTC 25th November

Published by Matthew Revell in Notifications

As I blogged yesterday, Launchpad 1.1.11 includes major speed and reliability improvements to Launchpad Translations. Much of this is thanks to a new simplified structure for the Translations database.

With 837,333 strings across 8,112 templates in 244 languages, the patch to modify the Translations database tables affects millions of rows of data. Extensive testing gave us a benchmark of around three hours to apply the new database structure. During yesterday’s release of 1.1.11, it became clear that it would actually take much longer.

Rather than keep Launchpad offline for longer than the three and a half hour window we’d announced, we decided to delay the roll-out of Launchpad 1.1.11. Thankfully, PostgreSQL and the scripts that we use to apply the updates to our database are fully transactional so no recovery step was needed.

Following further testing, we’re now going to release Launchpad 1.1.11 on Sunday 25th November. We’re allowing an eight hour window, meaning that we expect Launchpad to be offline between 03.00 UTC and 11.00 UTC on that day.

Thanks for bearing with us while we take Launchpad offline for this time.

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Translations

Published by Matthew Revell November 22, 2007 in Translations

Translating using Launchpad is now faster and you’ll see next to no timeouts.

Over the past month, Launchpad’s Translations developers – Carlos, Danilo and Jeroen – have worked exclusively on simplifying the database and code used by Launchpad Translations. Danilo told me a bit about what they’ve done:

“This is a very welcome change of data model which has enabled us to cut the code size by 30%, improve speed and keep the same set of features. Even if this doesn’t solve all the timeout problems, it provides us with the infrastructure to do so in the near future.”

If you use Launchpad Translations, you can expect exports and imports to take roughly half as long as before and everyday use of Launchpad Translations to be noticeably faster.

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Inkscape moving to Launchpad!

Published by Matthew Revell November 21, 2007 in General

Inkscape logoThe community behind Inkscape – the free software vector drawing tool – have chosen Launchpad as their new bug tracker!

Bryce Harrington, one of the project’s founders, explained why:

“The Inkscape project is gearing up for our next coming release, and based on our experience doing the past release, our current bug tracking system is really not up to the task of managing a large number of bugs.

“Launchpad has all the usual advanced bug management capabilities that we need. We’re also looking forward to making good use of the external bug tracker linking for keeping a watch on key bug reports in Cairo, Gtk, and other projects we depend on.”

Launchpad developer James Henstridge is working with the Inkscape team over the next few days to import their bug history from Sourceforge. If you’re interested in switching your project’s bug tracking to Launchpad – with complete bug history – drop us a mail to feedback@launchpad.net.

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Launchpad downtime 02.00 UTC 22 November

Published by Matthew Revell November 19, 2007 in Notifications

We’re releasing Launchpad 1.1.11 on Thursday 22nd November at 02.00 UTC.

When we roll out the new version, Launchpad will be offline for approximately three and a half hours (i.e. between 02.00 and 05.30 UTC). During this time, you’ll be unable to use Launchpad and also unable to log into some other services that use Launchpad to authenticate user accounts, such as the Ubuntu wiki and the Canonical store.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience this will cause. If you have questions or comments, please email us: feedback@launchpad.net.

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Introducing AutoPPA!

Published by Jamu Kakar November 7, 2007 in PPA

Launchpad’s Personal Package Archives (PPA) service takes a great deal of pain out of the packaging process. The days of maintaining system images for package builds are thankfully behind us, but preparing sources to upload to PPA can still be a tedious task. I’m primarily responsible for building packages for the Landscape client. There are several factors which make handling source uploads manually problematic:

Automation to the rescue! AutoPPA is an application that automates the process of preparing and uploading signed sources to PPA. A project using AutoPPA for automated source uploads needs to meet some criteria:

Setting up AutoPPA

The first thing we need to do is install and configure AutoPPA. Add the following deb lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list (replace the Ubuntu release name with whatever is appropriate for your system):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/autoppa/ubuntu gutsy universe
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/autoppa/ubuntu gutsy universe

Then, update and install autoppa.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install autoppa

Now, let’s assume we are building packages for the fictitious supertool Python application. For the sake of this example, we’ll assume that the branch to build from is stored at ~/src/supertool/trunk and has Debian package files already in place.

Let’s start by setting up ~/.autoppa.conf. This configuration file contains per-project configuration settings that are unlikely to change often. Here’s a sample:

[supertool]
email = Jamshed Kakar
branch = /home/jkakar/src/supertool/trunk
repository = /home/jkakar/src/supertool
ppa = supertool-ppa
releases = dapper edgy feisty gutsy

The ’email’ field specifies the e-mail address to use in the changelog. The ‘branch’ field specifies the location of the Bazaar branch that code will be built from. The ‘repository’ field specifies the location where temporary branches will be created. The ‘ppa’ field specifies the name of the PPA to upload to, as defined in ~/.dput.cf. Finally, the ‘releases’ field is a space-separated list of Ubuntu releases to prepare packages for. The configuration file can contain as many stanzas as you have projects to build with AutoPPA. Note that the name of the stanza must be the same as the name of the source package, as specified in debian/control.

We’re not quite ready to generate and upload signed sources. There are two more things we need to deal with first. The first is dealing with subtle differences in debian/control because of differences between Ubuntu releases. For a Python application, one of these is the reliance on python-support on dapper and python-central for edgy and newer. AutoPPA provides a simple file-template replacement mechanism to deal with this. Any files that end in .autoppa will be specially processed with output written to a file without the .autoppa extension. There is currently a single special directive, AUTOPPA_INCLUDE(...):, that is handled specially when encountered. If the following lines are defined in debian/control.autoppa:

AUTOPPA_INCLUDE(dapper):Build-Depends: debhelper, python-support,
lsb-release
AUTOPPA_INCLUDE(edgy,feisty,gutsy):Build-Depends: debhelper,
python-central, lsb-release

Then the following will be included in debian/control for Dapper:

Build-Depends: debhelper, python-support, lsb-release

and for Edgy, Feisty and Gutsy:

Build-Depends: debhelper, python-central, lsb-release

This allows us to have a single set of sources despite requiring minor differences for different Ubuntu releases. The obvious question is, why not just use an OR in the Build-Depends list? The answer is that sbuild, used by PPA to perform package builds, doesn’t handle ORs. There are also other cases where this kind of simple processing is handy.

The second thing we may want is version replacement. Any file, not just those that end in .autoppa, that include the special AUTOPPA_VERSION() string will be replaced with the version generated for the build. In Python code the following idiom can be used to assign the version to a local, for example:

VERSION = "AUTOPPA_VERSION(devel)"[len("AUTOPPA_VERSION("):-1]

When AutoPPA is run it will replace the ‘devel’ portion of that magic symbol with whatever version has been generated for the build.

Finally, Seahorse and devscripts needs to be configured to handle automatic GPG signing. You’ll need to import your GPG key into Seahorse and enable password caching. In order for Debian’s devscripts to work with Seahorse you’ll also need to do the following:

cp /usr/share/devscripts/conf.default ~/.devscripts.

Edit ~/.devscripts, find the ‘# DEBUILD_PRESERVE_ENVVARS=""‘ line and
replace it with:

DEBUILD_PRESERVE_ENVVARS="DISPLAY"

Phew. Thankfully all that is initial setup that you’ll hopefully never have to think about it again.

Using AutoPPA

Now that everything is set up for our fictitious project, we can use AutoPPA to generate signed sources and upload them for building by PPA. It’s accomplished with a single command:

autoppa supertool-1.0.0-supertool1

The first thing that will happen is that $EDITOR will be opened to collect changelog details. Once you’ve provided details for the changelog everything else should Just Work(tm). AutoPPA will do the following:

Now all we need to do is wait for PPA to build our packages! If you have more than one project setup in ~/.autoppa.conf you can specify multiple builds using a single command, such as:

autoppa supertool-1.0.0-supertool1 awesometool-1.0.0-awesometool1

That’s it! I hope AutoPPA turns out to be useful to others!

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Launchpad 1.1.10 now live

Published by Matthew Revell October 25, 2007 in Releases

Today we’ve made Launchpad‘s October 2007 release, 1.1.10!

Let’s take a look at some of the highlights:

Ubuntu bug triagers will be pleased to hear that the “Source package” panel has returned to distribution package bug pages.

Also this month we’re pleased to welcome Zope 2, Exaile and the Mobile and Internet Linux project who are now using Launchpad to track their bugs!

For a detailed view of what’s new in each part of Launchpad, read the full 1.1.10 release notes.

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