Launchpad Report for 2006-10-17
Christian Robottom Reis
kiko at async.com.br
Sat Oct 28 17:44:33 BST 2006
Here's a report of changes for the first two weeks of October. These
changes were rolled out last Tuesday, October 17th, at revision level
4161 (with a few cherry-picks for good measure).
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Highlights
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This has been a great rollout -- there are so many cool changes that I'm
going to have a hard time summarizing the highlights; be sure to read
the detailed changelog because it contains many interesting tidbits that
won't make it here!
You can use Launchpad to track Specifications too
-------------------------------------------------
I'd like to start out by pointing out a Launchpad feature that users may
not be as familiar with. Most people already know that Launchpad hosts a
bug tracking system, and a web translation interface; did you know we
also offer a complete specification management system?
The Launchpad spec tracker lets you track metadata related to a
document: what product or distribution it's about, who is the drafter,
who's going to implement it, and what the current status is. The
document itself can live anywhere; for instance, an Ubuntu specification
that talks about Accelerated X, is housed in Launchpad at:
https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/accelerated-x
The Launchpad page has a summary of the spec, a dependency graph and a
breakout of the metadata. The actual specification text lives at:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AcceleratedX
Note that the specification text can be kept anywhere -- it's just a URL
associated with the metadata. Any upstream product can register
specifications and manage them through Launchpad. This system can be
used to track any software-related text, ranging from implementation
proposals (like the Python PEP process) to hardcore technical
specifications.
Bazaar branching
----------------
James Henstridge delivers in this rollout a cool feature that I've
always been wanting to announce: it's now possible to use launchpad.net
URLs to check out software using bzr! To fetch the latest version of
Bazaar itself, for instance, just issue:
bzr branch http://launchpad.net/products/bzr
This works for any product in Launchpad that has a bzr branch associated
to it, including upstream SVN or CVS imports. So to fetch a Bazaar
branch for Gaim, the instant messaging software:
bzr branch http://launchpad.net/products/gaim
Is that cool or what? James blogged about how this was done at:
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/jamesh/2006/10/10/0
I shouldn't tell you (but I will anyway) that these URLs will get even
shorter and simpler Real Soon Now -- so stay tuned.
Please register your Ubuntu Mirror!
-----------------------------------
Guilherme Salgado put a lot of hard work into getting our mirror prober
in shape, and this last rollout includes FTP support and some
reliability enhancements, which were the last items necessary to allow
us to start using the mirror management system in production.
If you are a mirror administrator, please help us out by registering
your Ubuntu mirror in Launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+newmirror
The currently registered mirrors are at the following URLs:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+cdmirrors
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+archivemirrors
Once registered, we'll include your mirror in our official listings, and
it will be regularly probed for content and freshness. You'll also be
automatically notified if something goes wrong with your mirror. With
good listings, Ubuntu users will be properly directed to the nearest,
fastest and most current mirror, improving accessibility throughout.
Bug Tracking Enhancements
-------------------------
On the Malone front, Bjorn landed a first change to the process of
adding upstream bugwatches that will make a lot of users smile: you now
register bug watches entering URLs instead of picking from a list of
trackers and adding a bug id. This should make it a lot faster to
register watches, and this is just a first step, because the next
rollout will include more extensive bug forwarding improvements.
Brad fixed a long-standing bogosity in our subscription system: people
implicitly subscribed (those that appear as Also Notified: in the
subscriptions portlet) to duplicates are no longer implicitly subscribed
to the main bug, and if you are receiving bugmail because of a duplicate
subscription, you can unsubcribe anyway and Malone will just Do the
Right Thing.
Other Improvements
------------------
Other work worth noting: for the first time we enabled build failure
notifications for Soyuz, which means that uploaders now get emailed when
packages they sent off fail to build. A Soyuz sprint was held out in
Brazil and both cleanups and PPA work were furthered.
Matthew Thomas had an ingenious solution to the problem of those
meta-characters in Rosetta to indicate whitespace (those dots and
carriage return symbols), using images that conveniently behave
as expected when cutting-and-pasting in the browser.
Guilherme Salgado (yes, him again!) also implemented a feature that
allows us to track why a person was first registered in Launchpad when
it is done via an automatic process (such as a Rosetta translation
import); this rationale is now recorded and displayed when visiting the
person's page. Activating that page into a Launchpad account is now
easier than ever, too.
Finally, and as usual, I invite you to join our user-oriented mailing
list:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/launchpad-users
New features and enhancements are discussed there, and we'd love to have
your input in defining them. Thanks!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Detailed Changelog
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: In the listings below, important user-visible features or fixes
are marked with exclamation points; other highlights marked with a star.
Bug Tracking (Malone)
=====================
! Subscriptions for duplicate bugs were modified to be friendlier. We
now implicitly subscribe to a bug only the direct subscribers of
dupes, and we allow them to unsubscribe transparently (Malone actually
DTRT!). The portlet now makes clear who is a dupe subscriber and who
is implicitly subscribed, which hopefully clarifies things further.
(part of bug 48860, bradb, r=BjornT)
! Creating new bug watches is now done using URLs; this replaces the
former (rather clunky) UI that offered a dropdown of bugtrackers and a
bug id entry box. A number of enhancements were made as part of this
work; in particular, you can register watches using http or https
links, coping with the fact that some trackers allow both methods.
(bug 49818, BjornT, r=kiko)
* We now support Sourceforge in a much more robust way: there is a
single instance of the tracker, and individual bugs are addressed
directly. A minor fix was rolled out to this after the initial
deployment, incidentally.
(bugs 61590, 67359, jamesh, r=BjornT)
- Assigning a team as a bug contact for a distro no longer crashes if
the team doesn't have a contact email address.
(bug 57571, bradb)
- Bugs that are marked private after their creation now subscribe their
implicit subscribers explicitly; this had regressed in the last
rollout.
(bug 64017, bradb, r=salgado)
- Tag validation is now more robust, no longer crashing when invalid
values are entered.
(bugs 59975, 59972, BjornT, r=salgado)
- Text sizes in Malone are now saner under Safari.
(bug 41420, mpt)
- We now have a manual bug exporter, which produces an XML dump of a
product's bugs upon demand. It has no web UI yet, though.
(jamesh, r=salgado)
- We no longer tell people that bug contacts can be unsubscribed from
bugs, because they can't.
(bug 57587, bradb)
- The "jump to bug" form in the Malone front page no longer goes crazy
when a hash sign is typed into it.
(bug 63990, kiko)
Translations (Rosetta)
======================
* Rosetta no longer includes characters indicating whitespace; instead
we use images which behave correctly when cut and paste. The legend
for these characters is now consistent and should be less confusing to
translators.
(bugs 46, 35769, mpt, r=jamesh)
- The translation export page was fixed up to properly verify the form
values posted and ensure that the request is unique.
(bugs 1558, 44837, 63236, matsubara, r=kiko)
- Navigation in the import queue and translation group listings was sanitized.
(bug 29945, carlos)
- The "unofficial translator" notice is no longer presented as a warning.
(bug 56570, mpt, r=jamesh)
Distribution management (Soyuz)
===============================
! A one-week sprint was held in Brazil; in this sprint significant
progress was made in developing the infrastructure for PPA, and
getting the initial moving parts ready for it: uploads and builds.
Along with this we had a number of good discussions about ways to
enhance the codebase to deal with corner cases in better ways. An
excellent and refreshing week!
(cprov, malcc, kiko)
! Build failure notifications were enabled; this means that people
uploading packages to Ubuntu will now be notified through email if the
compilation failed. This feature is slightly experimental and is being
evaluated in production; a situation in which we emailed the wrong
person was detected and is being sorted out as we speak; the feature
should be completely live by next week.
(Credits to cprov, cjwatson and elmo)
! The mirror prober now handles FTP mirrors correctly, thanks to the use
of a Squid proxy. This should allow all existing Ubuntu mirrors to be
registered properly in Launchpad.
(salgado, r=kiko)
* We now continue reprobing failed mirrors and reenable them if they
start working again; this allows us to be more robust in light of
transient issues that may affect the prober or the mirror service
itself.
(bug 60235, salgado, r=kiko)
* CD image mirror status is now published via an RSS file, which allows
it to be parsed and its content included in other sites.
(bug 64029, salgado, r=BjornT)
* Duplicate source uploads that would end up in the NEW or UNAPPROVED
statuses are now rejected.
(bug 65052, cprov, r=spiv)
- When initializing new distribution releases we no longer automatically
initialize the Rosetta records.
(cprov, rs=kiko, carlos)
- The process-death-row script bungled up dry run and commit modes! This
caused us to delete things but not remember the deletion in the
database. It's now fixed, though.
(bug 65589, malcc, r=kiko)
- Germinate only places Task headers in the Packages files for the
seeds' relevant architectures; we used to add them to all
architectures, triggering installation of unnecessary packages.
(bug 62696)
- Death row processing was finally set up to be run via cron, and no
longer produces excessive spam.
(bugs 62447, 58888, malcc, r=salgado)
- Debian-installer garbage collection was fixed; it had been broken when
rsync started to be used on the dists tree.
(bug 58835, malcc, r=salgado)
- File sizes are now formatted into bytes using the IEC standard, which
means KiB and friends.
(kiko, r=SteveA)
- The build listings are now ordered more sanely, in particular when
listing builds of all statuses. Some visual improvements were also
made to them.
(bug 31392, cprov, r=spiv)
- A few queries that used apt_pkg's VersionCompare were changed to use
debversion_sort_key(), which is significantly more efficient.
(kiko, r=salgado)
- The process-accepted and poimport scripts now run at a reduced
isolation level, committing more often, thus avoiding random conflicts
during publisher runs.
(bug 46559, cprov, carlos, r=stub)
- Broken image "topic", fixed.
(matsubara)
- Use of selectAlso in distribution.py wasn't necessary and is now
history.
(kiko, r=jamesh)
- Nascentupload was updated to cope with newer versions of apt.
(malcc)
- We no longer clear out override files that we are not going republish
later; this was an unfortunate side-effect of optimizations that
carefully publish only the data in pockets which have changes in them.
(bug 64840, malcc, r=BjornT)
- Viewing builds for source packages which were just created no longer
crashes. A few cleanups and test improvements were made as part of
this fix.
(bug 62545, cprov, r=spiv)
Code Branch Management (Bazaar)
===============================
! Product pages now act as bazaar branch references, which allows you to
use bzr to branch on a URL like https://launchpad.net/products/bzr
which is as convenient as sliced bread.
(bug 39015, jamesh, r=spiv)
! The source details form for products was significantly simplified.
They now allow clear indication of what source control system is in
use, with its accompanying details. The code related to this feature
was significantly cleaned up as part of this work.
(bugs 5247, 5768, 50569, jamesh, r=salgado)
* David has been busy cooking some tasty cscvs voodoo to bring large
improvements in svn import coverage; a few of the changes planned were
implemented and deployed.
(ddaa, r=BjornT)
- Imports now survive when the working directory of the job hasn't been
created yet; this can happen when products are renamed and in other
similar corner cases.
(ddaa)
- The source details form for a product series was fixed to no longer
emit a confusing warning when the packaging-related elements are left
incomplete.
(bug 46240, ddaa, r=SteveA)
- A few tests in cscvs had the same name and thus were not being run;
this was fixed.
(ddaa)
- More baz-related code was removed; pybaz and gnarly are now no longer
used in Launchpad and will be dropped from the repository.
(ddaa, r=SteveA, stub)
Support Tracker
===============
Feature Tracking (Blueprint)
============================
* A permissions issue when viewing sessions approved for a meeting was fixed.
(bug 50816, matsubara, r=jamesh)
- Approving sprint agenda items regressed with a recent API update; this
is now fixed.
(bug 57152, matsubara)
- Drivers can now approve sprint agenda items.
(matsubara, r=jamesh)
- The status change link is no longer presented to users who can't
actually modify the specification.
(bug 64758, matsubara)
General Launchpad
=================
! People that were automatically registered in Launchpad can now find
out exactly why they were registered, and we track this information
now in all the places which register people -- package processing,
translation parsing and others.
(spec PersonCreationRationale, salgado, r=BjornT)
* Portlets that are displayed in the main content area no longer look
like portlets, but proper content. Portlet headings now use <h2>
instead of <h4>.
(bug 41755, mpt, rs=jamesh)
- A crash that happened when registering a team with no contact email
address was fixed.
(bug 66622, matsubara, r=kiko)
- Performance fixes were done to the person listings, which fixes most
timeouts in that area. However, a PostgreSQL limitation was found
while deploying this, which means that some pages may still time out.
(bug 56638, kiko, r=salgado)
- A number of python sets were being used unsorted in the codebase;
these were fixed. The obsolete sets module is no longer used in favor
of the builtin set type.
(kiko)
- A link to the [currently disabled] calendar application was removed
from the feedback page.
(mpt)
- A number of database classes now record a creation date for their records.
(stub)
- The active application is now properly highlighted in the facet menu.
(bug 64080, kiko)
Infrastructure
==============
- The mail sending module had a few assertions corrected.
(matsubara, r=salgado)
- More debugging of strange login failures was implemented.
(part of bug 61153, matsubara)
- SQLObject set operations no longer attempt to include prejoins, since
they don't really make sense.
(bug 62019, kiko, r=jamesh)
- The authentication server no longer knows anything about creating
users or changing passwords (god forbid!)
(salgado, r=SteveA)
- The find_portlet() doctest helper now handles whitespace robustly.
(flacoste, r=salgado)
- Bugmail that is sent by unregistered users is now silently dropped;
this was done to reduce the amount of noise caused by people trying to
spam Malone!
(stub, r=BjornT)
- Unreferenced OOPS reports are now pruned; this went through a number
of iterations and fixes before deployment.
(stub, r=jamesh)
- Internationalized messages can now be safely used in notification
boxes.
(bug 54987, stub)
- Reading session credentials now survives race conditions better,
fixing some rare crashes.
(bug 61153, stub)
- Support was added to blacklist the use of certain words as names of
people, products or distributions.
(spec NameBlacklist, stub, r=jamesh)
- An updated copyright was added to the 503 error page.
(bug 41273, matsubara)
Upcoming Changes
================
- Distribution Release Bug Targeting (BjornT)
- Guided filing of bugs (BjornT)
- Bug forwarding workflow improvements (BjornT)
- Attaching files to bugs through email (BjornT)
- Performance enhancements to translation pages (kiko)
- Soyuz ArchiveRework (malcc, cprov)
- Support tracker workflow enhancements (flacoste)
- Spectacular and outlandish Launchpad UI changes (stay tuned)
- Subversion Partial-copy support (ddaa)
Feedback
========
Feedback to the release announcement can come directly to me:
<kiko at canonical.com>
Bugs and regressions in Launchpad should go to:
https://launchpad.net/products/launchpad/+bugs
Questions and administrative requests should go to:
https://launchpad.net/products/launchpad/+tickets
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks,
--
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3376 0125
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