Launchpad Report for 2006-01-30

[Christian Robottom Reis]

Here's a report of changes for the last week of January. This was rolled
out into production on Tuesday, 2006-01-31, at revision 3039 (with
revision 3043 added for extra flavor).

Important user-visible features or fixes are marked with exclamation
points; other highlights marked with a star.

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Highlights
==========
This week's important changes include a number of performance fixes
across the board, Malone improvements to bug filing and the email
interface, the Soyuz rollout (which is still in-progress) and proper SSL
for Shipit.

Malone
======
! It is now possible to file bugs on both source package names and
  binary package names; it used to be restricted to source package
  names. This allows any end-user reporting a bug to include any
  relevant package name he is aware of (or remembers). Distribution
  end-users are generally concerned with [installable] binary packages,
  so this change should be an important improvement (bradb)
! Malone no longer includes email attachments as bug attachments. This
  reduces the clutter in bugmail and comments; a command will be added
  to explicitly indicate an attachment should be included (bug 2653,
  BjornT)
* The advanced search page was fixed to preserve the arguments supplied
  when doing the basic search. It also deals correctly when no status is
  specified in a search (bugs 5394, 5324, salgado)
- Sample data was added for package bug contacts (bradb)

Soyuz
=====
! The Soyuz rollout is in progress. The production hardware on which the
  services will run has been set up, and a number of comprehensive
  pre-rollout tests have been done, exercising uploading, building,
  publishing, overriding and removing packages. A large number of small
  issues have been found and fixed. A number of tools for archive
  management have also been ported from the original archive management
  toolset to Soyuz. The tests are still proceeding and the final move to
  Soyuz is expected to happen in the next days (cprov, Kinnison, elmo,
  kiko, mdz)
- The build web interface was updated to properly indicate build
  statuses (cprov)
- Gina was modified to produce override publishing records when
  encountering a source package that had been previously published with
  different parameters (section, component and, for binary packages,
  priorities). Some queries were updated to work correctly with the
  publication semantics (kiko)
- Gina was also fixed to properly indicate what packages are
  architecture-specific, a bug which made the build sequencer work
  incorrectly (kiko)
- As part of the rollout changes, a number of permissions fixes to the
  database were issued (cprov)

Shipit
======
! Shipit no longer depends on any off-site templates or images; it
  formerly loaded some resources from www.ubuntu.com. This, in
  combination with Shipit's now-valid SSL certificate, allows for secure
  connections to be properly indicated as "secure" in web browsers
  (salgado)

Launchpad
=========
* An administrative interface was added to merge accounts. This allows
  accounts with no access to their original email addresses to be
  manually merged by a Launchpad administrator (bug 1281, matsubara,
  salgado)
* There is now a FAQ page in Launchpad (at /faq); the initial version of
  this page only has a stub set of questions but it will be expanded
  during these coming weeks to address common questions and issues (daf)
* The karma cache was moved to a separate table; this should reduce
  contention on the Person table, which is a source of performance
  problems (stub)
* A materialized view was created to make queries for valid people in
  the database fast; this should be a significant performance boost to
  Launchpad once it is actually used in vocabularies (stub)
- Vocabulary queries for people (which are used when we pick assignees
  or owners in various places in Launchpad) were also optimized slightly
  (mdz, salgado)

Infrastructure
==============
* An important change to how SQLObject's search results behave was
  implemented; this improves performance by greatly reducing the number
  of COUNT(*) queries issued per request (jamesh, SteveA)
- Oops IDs are now fully unique, they include the number of days since
  2006-01-01 (jamesh)
- The librarian front page was updated. Incidentally, it uses the
  an out-of-date copyright header and the infamous <blink> tag (bug
  29048, stub)
- Some constraints to the database that caused database restores to run
  in geological time were dropped (stub)
- A number of scripts in the tree were fixed to make it easier to set up
  new trees; this included link-external-sourcecode,
  launchpad-database-setup and the Makefile (mdz, kiko)

Upcoming Changes
================
- Mirror management probing (salgado)
- Performance improvements to vocabulary queries making use of the
  valid person materialized view (salgado)
- Test suite improvements to support running a story (lifeless)
- Fixes to the buildbox test suite (ddaa)
- Optional branch titles for bzr branches (daf, ddaa)
- Convenient bug listings for bug contacts (bradb)
- PoMsgSetPage and improvements to how suggestions are displayed
  (carlos)
- A number of bug watch improvements (BjornT)
- FormLayout implementation (mpt, BjornT)
- Further performance fixes to SQLObject (jamesh)

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Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3376 0125