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Launchpad 1.1.12 now live!

Published by Matthew Revell December 20, 2007 in Releases

Welcome to the last Launchpad release of 2007! The highlights of Launchpad 1.1.12 include:

Read the full release notes for more on what’s new in this release. See you next year when we’ll be back in January with Launchpad 1.2.1!

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Zope CMF and LibMMS switch to Launchpad

Published by Matthew Revell in General

Another part of the Zope project – the Zope Content Management Framework (CMF) – has joined both Zope 2 and Zope 3 in using Launchpad to track bugs, making it much easier for all three to work together on common bugs.

Similarly, Soren Hansen is now using Launchpad to track bugs and host code for LibMMS, a library for connecting to Window Media streams. He told me why he wanted to host the code in Launchpad:

“I have a couple of other projects on Launchpad that I pretty much just put there to share them with co-workers and such, but out of nowhere, branches popped up with new features from people I’ve never talked to (neither before nor since).

“It’s really distributed revision system at it’s best. One of the things that could have gone wrong when people started adopting distributed version control was that changes would never flow back upstream. Adding Launchpad to the workflow makes it all come together naturally.”

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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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