Hosts: Matthew Revell, Joey Stanford and Elliot Murphy.
Theme: Obscurity by Barry Warsaw.

This show was recorded before the Launchpad 1.2.6 roll-out.

• 00:56: About the bug page, distro page and translations page UI changes - give us your feedback on them!
• 04.10: Members of the Launchpad user community have developed Greasemonkey scripts to tweak Launchpad’s interface.
• 07.01: Launchpad developer Tom Berger talks about his work on the Launchpad bug tracker, the bug page UI changes and the forthcoming Launchpad API.
• 13.48: Joey’s secret number of the week! Plus an insight into Launchpad’s future and our QA.

Send us your ideas and questions to feedback@launchpad.net!

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New features in this release include:

• two great improvements to code review, including an email interface
• a new interface for bugs, translations and distribution pages
• and more control code imports!

Read on for more about what’s new and how it affects you.

Code review by email

Launchpad’s new code review system gives you a public place to discuss and vote on proposed code mergers. What’s more, you can easily access the discussion directly from both the target and source branch.

This month, we’ve added an email interface to make it easier to fit Launchpad-based code review into your workflow.

Read more in our blog post on code review by email.

Nominate a code reviewer

More improvements to Launchpad’s code review!

If you’re involved in a merge proposal - as the owner of either the source or target branch - you can invite someone else to give their view on the proposal.

Visit any of your merge proposals to trigger an email invitation to take part in your code review.

Bugs, translations and distribution pages now easier to use

We’ve revamped the bug view, translations and distribution pages to make them easier to use.

Read more in our blog post on the simplified bug page, translations and distro page UI.

More control over code imports

Launchpad’s code imports give you all the benefits of Bazaar’s distributed version control for code that’s stored in CVS and Subversion repositories.

Now you can get far more detail on the progress of individual code imports direct on that import’s overview page.

Michael Hudson, the Launchpad developer whose been working on the new code import system, explains more in our blog post.

Other changes this month

Launchpad’s now running Bazaar 1.6b3, which will pave the way for quicker uploads to projects that already have code in Launchpad. Stay up to date with the latest Bazaar release news.

For full details of the bug fixes and features that make up this release, take a look at the 1.2.6 milestone page.

Stay in touch!

Thanks for your bug reports, feature ideas and other feedback! If you come across any bugs, please report them.

If you want to get in touch for any other reason, join us in #launchpad or on launchpad-users.

July’s going to be an exciting time for Launchpad. Keep an eye on this blog!

This month, we’ve added an email interface to make it easier to fit Launchpad-based code review into your workflow.

Aaron Bentley, who’s been working on the feature, explains:

Code review by email makes each merge proposal into a mini-mailing list. People can participate fully in code review whether they prefer to do it using web or email.

Taking part in a code review by email is very much like using the Launchpad bug tracker’s email interface.

Reply to an email from the code review and your comment is added to the discussion in Launchpad. If you want to vote by email, leave a space at the start of the line and then one of the following commands:

• vote approve
• vote disapprove
• vote abstain

So, now code review in Launchpad is as easy as any code review by email but with the added benefit of a public record of the code review in Launchpad.

Now, on bugs pages, the translations pages and distribution overview pages you’ll see that many of the option you use most often are now in the body of the page, right next to the data they affect.

Let’s take a look at a bug in the OpenOffice.org package in Ubuntu as an example.

Here you can see that options such as “Mark as duplicate” and “Link a related branch” are now right in the body of the page. Matthew Paul Thomas, who looks after Launchpad’s UI, explained the changes:

“We realize that if you’ve been using Launchpad for a while, these changes may take a bit of getting used to. But we’re confident that the new designs will be more efficient once you’re familiar with them. We also expect they’ll be easier for people using Launchpad for the first time.

“They also pave the way for even simpler interfaces in future Launchpad releases, where you’ll be able to click on something and edit it in place.”

Let us know how you get on with these page designs.

Now you can get far more detail on the progress of individual code imports, direct on that import’s overview page. You can also see when the next import is due and, if that’s not soon enough, request one take place straight away.

For an example, take a look at the Cairo Dock import.

Michael Hudson is the Launchpad developer who’s been working on this. He had this to say:

“The main change is that all the information about the state of the system is now stored in one place. While this in itself isn’t very visible to our users, it means that we can now give them a lot more information about the status of a new or existing import.

“The new system is also better automated, which frees up our sysadmins to get on with other important work!”

Launchpad goes offline: 00.00 UTC 1st July
Expected back online: 02.00 UTC 1st July.

To get email notification of future service-affecting issues, join our new ultra-low traffic mailing list, launchpad-announce.

Hosts: Matthew Revell, Joey Stanford and Elliot Murphy.
Theme: Obscurity by Barry Warsaw.

• 04.25: The Launchpad Operational Sys Admins - Tom Haddon and Herb McNew - talk about their work keeping Launchpad online.
• 09.10: Joey’s numbers of the week - this time it’s Translations!
• 11.08: Elliot interviews GnomeDo project leader David Siegel.
• 18.20: It’s goodbye from us! Including some listener feedback.

Send us your ideas and questions to feedback@launchpad.net!

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Downtime details

• June 17th 22.00 UTC - 03.00 UTC: all of Launchpad will be offline.
• June 18th 22.00 UTC - 00.00 UTC: code browse and pushing and pulling to code branches hosted on Launchpad will be unavailable.
• June 19th 22.00 UTC - 03.00 UTC: uploading to, building and publishing in package archives - both distribution archives and PPAs - will be unavailable.

Why this is happening

We’re upgrading the servers that host Launchpad to use the latest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 LTS (also known as Hardy Heron). This will give us an improved platform on which to develop new Launchpad services. Specifically, we’ll get Python 2.5 and PostgreSQL 8.3, along with updates to several libraries that Launchpad relies on.

We’re sorry for the down-time and service interruptions that these upgrades will cause.

If you have any questions, please post them to the launchpad-users.

Please note: we have a new ultra-low traffic list for Launchpad service announcements. Subscribe to launchpad-announce.

Hosts: Matthew Revell, Joey Stanford and Elliot Murphy.
Theme: Obscurity by Barry Warsaw.

• 01.35: Matthew interviews Andrea Colangelo, Community Manager of the BeeSeek open source search engine project.
• 20.47: Joey previews his OSCON talk about Launchpad.
• 22.25: Joey talks about the QA opening in the Launchpad team.
• 27.09: Elliot talks about Twisted’s umbrella Launchpad project for community code.
• 28.10: Joey replies to Philip Newborough’s comments about Launchpod.
• 30.08: Joey’s numbers of the week! This time it’s all about the bug tracker.

Send us your ideas and questions to feedback@launchpad.net!

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Podcast feed.

However, actually discussing the merits of the merger had to take place elsewhere, such as by email or even using a bug tracker to record the conversation.

We’ve now brought that discussion right into Launchpad. Anyone logged into Launchpad can comment and vote on proposed mergers. Take a look at one of the first comments.

There’s more about this new feature in our latest podcast.