launchpadblog

Here’s a brief changelog of what we’ve been up to since our last general update.

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Here’s a brief changelog for this month.

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Here’s a brief changelog for this month.

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Once again it’s been a while since we posted a general update, so here’s a changelog-style summary of what we’ve been up to.  As usual, this changelog preserves a reasonable amount of technical detail, but I’ve omitted changes that were purely internal refactoring with no externally-visible effects.

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Here’s a brief changelog for this month.

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Well, it’s been a while!  Since we last posted a general update, the Launchpad team has become part of Canonical’s Online Services department, so some of our efforts have gone into other projects.  There’s still plenty happening with Launchpad, though, and here’s a changelog-style summary of what we’ve been up to.

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Launchpad has had Git-to-Bazaar code imports since 2009, along with imports from a few other systems.  These form part of Launchpad’s original mission to keep track of free software, regardless of where it’s hosted.  They’re also very useful for automatically building other artifacts, such as source package recipes or snap packages, from code hosted elsewhere.  Unfortunately they’re quite complicated: they need to be able to do a full round-trip conversion of every revision from the other version control system, which has made it difficult to add support for Git features such as signed commits or submodules.  Once one of these features is present anywhere in the history of a branch, importing it to Bazaar becomes impossible.  This has been a headache for many users.

We can do better nowadays.  As of last year, we have direct Git hosting support in Launchpad, and we can already build snaps and recipes straight from Git, so we can fulfil our basic goal more robustly now with a lot less code.  So, Launchpad now supports Git-to-Git code imports, also known as Git mirroring.  You can use this to replace many uses of Git-to-Bazaar imports (note that there’s no translations integration yet, and of course you won’t be able to branch the resulting import using bzr).

See our Git documentation for more details.

We just rolled out a new feature for Launchpad’s Git repository hosting: Git-based merge proposals can now be linked to Launchpad bugs.  This can be done manually from the web UI for the merge proposal, but normally you should just mention the Launchpad bug in the commit message of one of the commits you want to merge.  The required commit message text to link to bugs #XXX and #YYY looks like this:

LP: #XXX, #YYY

This is the same form used for Launchpad bug references in debian/changelog files in source packages, and the general approach of mentioning bugs in commit messages is similar to that of various other hosting sites.

Bugs are not automatically closed when merge proposals land, because the policy for when that should happen varies from project to project: for example, projects often only close bugs when they make releases, or when their code is deployed to production sites.

Users familiar with Bazaar on Launchpad should note that the model for Git bug linking is slightly different: bugs are linked to merge proposals rather than to individual branches.  This difference is mainly because individual branches within a Git repository are often much more ephemeral than Bazaar branches.

Documentation is here, along with other details of Launchpad’s Git hosting.

Here’s what the Launchpad team did in October.

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If you are a member of Launchpad’s beta testers team, you can now try out webhooks for Bazaar branches and Git repositories. These can be used to set up integration with external sites for various purposes, such as running CI jobs or publishing documentation. We expect to open this up to all Launchpad users soon, but in the meantime please do file a bug against Launchpad itself if you encounter any problems.

See our webhooks documentation for more details.

Update: as of 2015-11-20, this feature is enabled for all Launchpad users.