Launchpad 1.1.8 released
Published by Matthew Revell August 23, 2007 in Releases
Earlier this morning, we unleashed Launchpad 1.1.8, our release for August 2007.
1.1.8 sees a great deal of activity in the Bug Tracker, an important new feature in Code, an exciting development in the Personal Package Archives beta and improvements right across every other part of Launchpad.
Highlights include:
- The Personal Package Archives beta is now ready to start running in Launchpad’s production environment (launchpad.net) and will be available to Launchpad beta testers a day or two after this release.
- Branch owners can now specify which branch, if any, they intend to merge their code into. This will make it easier for other Launchpad users to understand the original branch owner’s intentions for their code.
- People, projects and distribution series (e.g. Ubuntu Feisty) have pages showing their own translation import queues.
- Branches with no subscribers, links or mirrors can be deleted.
- Emails from the Bug Tracker now state the bug’s milestone in the header.
- Setting a bug’s tag is now possible using the email interface.
- The bug view page is easier to use following several interface improvements.
There’s a whole load more, too! Read the full release notes to find out more.
How we develop Launchpad – an interview
Published by Matthew Revell August 13, 2007 in Podcast
With gigabytes of live data and thousands of users, I was keen to know how Launchpad’s development team work together to produce a new release each month.
I chatted with one of my Launchpad colleagues, Joey Stanford, at Canonical’s London offices to find out more about:
- Launchpad’s four weekly release cycles.
- How a features makes it from idea to release.
- The importance of the Launchpad Beta Testers team.
You can download our conversation as:
- Ogg Vorbis file
- and MP3 file.
Meet the Launchpad team on August 15th in #launchpad
Published by Matthew Revell August 10, 2007 in General
Come and chat to some of the Launchpad team on August 15th at 16.00 UTC in #launchpad.
If you have any burning Launchpad questions, want to make a suggestion or otherwise want to chat with some of the team behind Launchpad, we’d love to meet you.
Add your question or comment to the agenda at:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaunchpadUserMeeting/2007-08-15
Maintenance Sunday 5th August 2007
Published by Matthew Revell August 2, 2007 in Notifications
On Sunday 5th August, we’re taking Launchpad offline for roughly five hours.
The downtime between 4am and 9am UTC will allow us to carry out routine database maintenance.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience this will cause. If you want to find out about future maintenance periods or major changes to Launchpad, subscribe to our Notifications feed or check our Maintenance page.
Launchpad 1.1.7 released
Published by Matthew Revell July 19, 2007 in Releases
The past four weeks have flown by in a flurry of activity here in the
Launchpad team, resulting in the most improvements of any 2007 release
so far! 1.1.7 brings bug fixes and new features right across Launchpad.
What’s new in 1.1.7?
Highlights in Launchpad 1.1.7 include:
- Larger font size: visit launchpad.net and you’ll see that we’ve increased the size of the text used on the site, making it easier to read Launchpad’s default text size.
- New remote bug tracker support: Launchpad can now track bugs in the Mantis bug tracker. (Find out more)
- Improved duplicate bug handling: if someone has already reported the bug you’ve encountered it’s now much easier to select that report rather than create a duplicate.
- Frequently Asked Questions in the Answer Tracker: answer contacts can now mark frequently asked questions and create a canonical answer that is available to anyone using the Answer Tracker. (Quick-start guide)
- Teams can now set their default language: teams can become an answer contact for a specific language.
- Branch associations: you can now see all bugs, blueprints and subscribers associated with a branch on its branch associations page.
For full details of Launchpad 1.1.7, take a look at the release notes.
I’ll also be blogging here soon in more details about the new features in 1.1.7!
A Storm is brewing!
Published by Matthew Revell July 13, 2007 in Storm
This week, our colleagues in Canonical’s Storm team announced the release of their work as an open source project.
I caught up with Gustavo Niemeyer, who leads the Storm team, and asked him to describe what Storm is about.
Gustavo: Storm is an object-relation mapper (ORM) for the Python language. In simple terms, it allows rows from a relational database to be seen as objects in an object-oriented language like Python.
Matthew: How is Storm different to other similar open source ORMs?
Gustavo: The story behind Storm is that some of the projects developed by Canonical are being built in a way that the same kind of data may be partitioned on multiple databases. We’ve tried to use existing Python ORMs in that model for some time, and even tried to collaborate with upstream projects, but the result wasn’t satisfactory, considering the timeframe available. This led to Storm being started as a prototype, and when it eventually proved to be a feasible solution for the problem, it replaced the ORM in use up to that point.
Matthew: So how can people work on Storm?
Gustavo: The first step is getting in touch with us via the mailing list or the IRC channel. There’s more information about them at the Storm website.
Bazaar 0.17
Published by Matthew Revell July 3, 2007 in Bazaar
The release of Bazaar 0.17, a couple of weeks ago, got me thinking.
Before I joined the Launchpad team, I knew that version control was important but it wasn’t something I thought about a great deal.
In previous jobs, I’d used Subversion to manage documentation and, although I could see the benefits, it often seemed more hassle than it was worth, particularly to my colleagues.
Then I started looking more closely at Bazaar. I saw that it didn’t need a central server, so getting set-up was pain-free and I could work anywhere. It also allowed me to just get on with organising my work the way I wanted to: if I decided that, after all, I didn’t need a directory called “drafts” but instead wanted two directories called “in-progress” and “awaiting-review”, then Bazaar was happy to accommodate me.
But as a non-developer, I rarely even take Bazaar out of second gear. I’d love to hear your stories of using Bazaar. What one thing about Bazaar really makes your life easier? What five, ten, twenty things about Bazaar get you excited? Post your comments here or mail me – feedback@launchpad.net.
Coming soon to a Launchpad near you!
Published by Matthew Revell June 29, 2007 in Coming changes, General
There’s a lot to Launchpad. Right now, we’ve got: five main applications, 3,397 registered projects, 1172 teams, a staggering 1,121,443 people registered and a heck of a lot of code.
Milestones
To make it easier to manage Launchpad’s development, we release a new version roughly every four weeks. The next release we’re due to make is milestone 1.1.7 on 18 July. Then 1.1.8 comes on 22 August.
You can see what blueprints and bugs are targeted against each part of Launchpad by visiting the milestone links on the Launchpad project overview page.
There’s an easier way, though…
Quick overview of coming features
If you’re not interested in every detail and want to know about only the most interesting or important features, you can take a look at our Coming Features page.
It’s split into each of the main Launchpad applications – Bug Tracker, Code Hosting, Blueprint, Answers and Translations – and gives you a brief overview of what we’ve got planned for the next couple of months
Talk to me
The great thing about the Coming Features page is it’s an easy way to see what changes might affect you. So, let’s take an example:
Frequently asked questions occur in every project. A new feature in the Answer Tracker will help users to find the best answer to a project’s most commonly asked questions. Answer contacts will be able to identify FAQ and provide the canonical answer, meaning that users can get straight to the information they need. FAQ will be searchable in their own right and will also be offered as a possible answer when a user asks a matching question.
If you’re an Answer Contact, the new FAQ feature could have quite an effect on the way you work. If you had concerns or questions, you get to voice them long before the feature is released and in time to have an impact on its implementation.
So, take a look at the Coming Features page, subscribe to it and then email me – feedback@launchpad.net – with you comments, questions and suggestions!
Update: I’ve added a feed for Coming Features at http://news.launchpad.net/category/coming-features/feed
Milestone 1.1.6 released
Published by Administrator June 21, 2007 in Releases
Welcome to Launchpad’s June 2007 release, milestone 1.1.6!
It has been another month of intense activity here on the Launchpad. Alongside the usual bug fixes and incremental improvements, this release introduces:
- Some bug status names have been improved, with no effect on how are they are used. However, two new bug statuses have been introduced that are available only to a project’s bug contacts. You can find out more on the Bug Statuses help page.
- Teams can now only join other teams with the approval of the first team’s administrator.
- Team members can now renew their own memberships, when their membership is close to expiry if the team is set-up with an on-demand policy.
- Answer contacts will now receive notification of new questions in their preferred languages only.
- Launchpad Translations now displays how many and which of a project’s translations diverge from upstream.
- After nearly three years, the rosetta-users mailing list is closing.
- All Launchpad Translations discussion is now on launchpad-users.
- File Downloads – released in 1.1.5 – allow projects to make tarballs, installers and documentation available for download through Launchpad. Find out more in our File Downloads Overview.
- This blog is now live!
Read the full release notes for details of improvements right across Launchpad.
Keep reading the Launchpad News blog to find out what’s new in Launchpad, who’s using it and how you can make the most of it.
Welcome to Launchpad News!
Published by Matthew Revell June 19, 2007 in General
Welcome to the new Launchpad News blog!
This is where you’ll be able to find information on what’s new in Launchpad, who’s using it and learn more about the team behind it.
If you have anything in mind that you’d like to see on this blog, email the Launchpad team: feedback@launchpad.net.