Recently, Ursula and I have been improving the way that we test new Launchpad features.
Already, Launchpad has an extensive test suite but there are some things that automated tests can’t look out for. Rather than just testing the quality of our code, we also want to test the quality of the experience.
To do that, we’ve been doing more exploratory testing. Now, when a feature is getting close to deployment we will try out every part of the feature and make notes of anything in the experience that needs to be fixed before we release it. In particular, we’re interested in the feature’s:
ease of use and discoverability
completeness
quality of implementation
suitability to the problem it is solving
conformity to Launchpad’s principles and UI guidelines.
We’re also aiming to timebox the testing; something that takes too long to explore is likely too complex. For now, we’re using a 25 minute limit, as borrowed from The Pomodoro Technique, as it seems like a good starting point.
If you’re interested in what we’re doing, you can follow our progress both on the launchpad-dev mailing list and on the Launchpad dev wiki. Also, I’m hoping that we can get your help in testing beta features. I’ll write more about that soon.
learn Debian packaging through hours of study and practice
borrow existing packaging from elsewhere, throw a couple of Bazaar branches together and let Launchpad handle the rest
Uruguay in both 1930 and 1950.
If you selected either of the first answers you’d be right.
Okay, so, if you want to do it for real — i.e. become an Ubuntu MOTU or otherwise create Debian-style packages from scratch — then you still need to go through the hard work.
However, for everyone else who really just needs to get something out there and working for, say, a group of beta testers, we now have Launchpad’s source package recipes.
How it works, in three steps
It’s almost ridiculously easy to set up a source package build:
Choose a branch in Launchpad, whether hosted directly or imported.
Write a short recipe that tells Launchpad which other branches to pull in, for example to provide packaging or make the code buildable.
Paste your recipe into Launchpad.
And that’s it. Within a few minutes you can set up a daily build direct from your trunk or any other buildable branch in Launchpad.
Watch how it works in our screencast:
An example
Let’s say you’re the developer of a home finance application called Alvin. You track your project’s code using Git and host it on your own server. For the past couple of years Alvin has been packaged in the Ubuntu universe and your trunk has also been imported from Git to a Bazaar branch in Launchpad at lp:alvin.
Just as you’re approaching Alvin’s next release, you want to get some wider testing. In the past, you’ve published a nightly tarball and provided instructions on manual installation. That’s given you a handful of dedicated beta testers but you’re worried that you’re asking too much of people.
With Launchpad’s source package recipes, you write a short recipe that pulls in your trunk branch, adds the packaging from Alvin’s existing Ubuntu package and then builds an installable Ubuntu package in the PPA of your choice:
Paste the recipe into Launchpad and with a couple of clicks you have a daily build of your trunk, that’s published as an Ubuntu package in your PPA.
Now you can ask people to test the latest Alvin code by doing no more than adding your PPA to their system. Launchpad will build a new version of the package on each day it spots a change in your trunk (or the Ubuntu packaging). For your beta testers, any changes will show up just like any other Ubuntu update.
Simple as that!
Here’s a quick recap of how it works: you can take any buildable branch — whether hosted in directly Launchpad or imported from Git, Subversion, CVS or Bazaar hosted elsewhere — merge or nest other branches, add packaging and then leave it to Launchpad to create a daily build that it publishes in your chosen PPA.
I’ll leave the last word to Luke Benstead, who has been using source package recipes while developing a set of game libraries:
I’ve been using LP to develop some small open source game libraries. Because there are quite a few of them, packaging them all is a pain, so the package builds have worked out pretty well for them.
Now I get nightly builds delivered to a PPA, so I know that if I fix a bug it’s reflected to all my machines. And my recipes are only a single line so they’ve been really easy to use. I’m not really sure how they could be easier.
There are also a bunch of client programs, command line and graphical, that talk to Launchpad to do various things.
What we don’t yet have, and what I think would be great, is a systematic client that lets you manipulate
everything from the command line. There’s some code that starts towards this in Hydrazine, lptools and others, but I think having just a single tool that eventually does everything would be more discoverable and avoid unnecessary fragmentation or duplication.
(That’s not to say there’s not room for others that are guis, that are specialized to particular projects or that encapsulate a lot of policy or opinion about what they’re doing.)
So dobey and I have agreed to gradually merge hydrazine into lptools, and with other people to work towards making lptools cover everything you can do through the web UI or the API. If you have scripts you’ve written yourself, perhaps you’d like to merge them in.
Sometimes you’d like to point people to an interesting bug in a project that uses Launchpad, like bug 685380 (that ‘1’ and ‘l’ may need to be more distinct in the new Ubuntu Font).
Typing out https://launchpad.net/bugs/685380 is a bit tedious, and it uses up a fair bit of space in a microblog entry. You can use any of innumerable URL-shortening services, but then the URL’s opaque; which is a shame since it really just wants to represent a 6-digit number.
Therefore: pad.lv (pad love), transparent short URLs for bugs, and other things including projects, people, bug-filing forms, packages, and more.
As part of improving performance we have disabled the substring matching of source package names. This fixes bug 268508 and bug 607960. However its a slightly contentious issue – opinions vary about whether bug 268508 is a valid bug or not.
So we have only disabled it – the code is still present and when we have more leeway on the performance of bug searching we’ll revisit this and look into some design and UI analysis to decide whether substring matching of this sort should be done or not.
For now though, there should be less timeouts in bug searches.
Launchpad’s bug mail can be a bit chatty sometimes as I’m sure you’ve noticed. This cycle the Yellow Squad is working to give you more control about the bug mail Launchpad sends to you.
One problem that we’ve known about for a really long time was reported as bug 548 and has recently been closed thanks to the effort of Данило Шеган and Gary Poster. Their fix allows you to globally specify whether you want to receive email about actions you did.
Most people probably do not need to be reminded of something they did a few minutes ago and will want to turn off those emails. But, since this is new functionality we’ve preserved the old behavior unless a user changes the setting. If you do nothing you’ll continue to get email about actions you instigate on bugs.
As mentioned, this is just the first of many features and refinements that we’re working on to help you customize the stream of bug mail coming from Launchpad to suit your needs.
We have a small quandry on the Launchpad development team at the moment. As bug 268508 discusses, when one searches for a bug on Launchpad we do a substring search on the names of bug targets.
For instance, searching in Ubuntu for ‘gcc’ will return all bugs on the packages ‘gcc’, ‘gcc-4.4’, ‘gcc-4.3’, ‘gcc-3.3’ and so forth. Likewise search for bugs in a project group will do a similar substring search on each of the individual projects in the project group.
It turns out that doing this search is itself expensive. I asked on the Ubuntu devel list about turning it off. We would close bug 268508 and also significantly improve search performance.
However this is a possibly contentious change – there was one mail strongly in favour of the current behaviour – so I’d like to get this change proposed to a wider community.
If you’ve got a strong opinion – that the current behaviour is good, or like bug 268508 describes, that its a poor behaviour and we would be better off without it, then I’d love to hear from you. Just leave a comment on this post, drop me an email – robert at canonical.com – or post to the launchpad-users mailing list.
From today, all Launchpad bugs, code, questions and blueprints are tracked under the one launchpad project.
We’ve already moved everything from the individual projects over to the parent launchpad project. All you need do differently is search/file bugs, questions and blueprints under that parent Launchpad project, rather than Rosetta, for example.
Don’t worry, though, there are redirects in place so that old links will still work.
There are also a couple of one-time steps you may need to take:
Update your bug subscriptions: if you’re subscribed to individual bugs, you need do nothing. If you’re subscribed to all bugs for a particular project, Malone for example, you’ll now need to subscribe to all Launchpad bugs.
Check your answer contact status: if you’re an answer contact for one particular application in Launchpad, and want to continue as such, you’ll need to become an answer contact for all of Launchpad.
To start with, bugs that we’ve merged in from one of the old sub-projects will have a tag that shows which project it came from. However, we’re planning to drop those tags once everyone’s settled into using just the one project.
Our code hosting won’t change at all as we’ve always hosted code under the parent Launchpad project.
This new approach will better reflect that Launchpad is one codebase but will also have a big practical benefit: it’ll be easier to find bugs and dupes because everything will be under the same project.
Why we’re doing this
For almost four years now, Canonical’s Launchpad team has been divided along application lines: i.e. we have sub-teams who each look after a particular part of Launchpad. So, Deryck, Abel, Gavin and Graham are currently the Launchpad Bugs team and work on nothing other than Launchpad’s bug tracker.
Reflecting this team structure in our Launchpad projects has made it easier for those sub-teams to plan their work.
It has worked pretty well but we’re about to change the structure of Canonical’s Launchpad team for a couple of reasons:
we want to focus on releasing features, and fixing problems, wherever they are
we want all Canonical Launchpad developers to be familiar with the full Launchpad codebase, rather than focusing only on one part.
So, as of February 17th the Canonical Launchpad team will have five squads. At any one time, three of those squads will each be working on a particular feature and the other two will be working on maintenance. Once a feature squad finishes its feature, it’ll switch places with one of the maintenance squads.
This will mean that there’ll always be ten Canonical Launchpad developers dedicated to fixing bugs, dealing with critical issues and generally making sure that Launchpad is serving you well. And of course there’ll be fifteen developers working on new features.
I previously posted about our continuous deployment efforts in Launchpad. Since then the project has come a long way. We can deploy to nearly all our services without downtime. The remaining services are a bit trickier – but we are working on them.
As part of the project we are consolidating the ‘edge’ domain – https://edge.launchpad.net/, https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ and other similar domains – into the main launchpad UI. These domains are now deprecated.
The most important thing this means for you is that for members of our beta test program, we will no longer redirect you to https://edge.launchpad.net/ – instead we are serving our beta UI directly from the main website. The edge site is now running exactly the same code as the main Launchpad cluster and is updated at exactly the same time.
We have done this to deliver new features to our users more efficiently and at the same time simplify our production environment. So far the project has been very successful from our perspective – as I write this we have 5 days of inventory – code we’ve written but not deployed. This is down from an average of 2 weeks prior to this initiative starting, and we often sit lower – 1 to 2 days worth.
In the coming months as we refine this process and project we want to remove the edge cluster. As part of this we will start redirecting browser requests to ‘edge’ domains to the main Launchpad domain.
API clients cannot be redirected in this way, so we also ask that anyone writing or using Launchpad API scripts update them to use the primary cluster. We will slowly decrease the cluster size and disable it completely once we see no traffic on it. The main cluster is currently 3 times the size and should perform better for nearly any API script. To do this, use LPNET_SERVICE_ROOT rather than EDGE_SERVICE_ROOT. To get the LPNET_SERVICE_ROOT symbol, import it from launchpadlib.uris:
from launchpadlib.uris import LPNET_SERVICE_ROOT
If you have any questions about any of this we’d be delighted to hear from you – here, on IRC or the launchpad-user mailing list.
