One of the projects I've been working on has been to improve aspects of the Ubuntu One Developer Documentation web site. While there are still some layout problems we are working on, it is now in a state where it is a lot easier for us to update. I have been working on updating our authentication/authorisation documentation and revising some of the file storage documentation (the API used by the mobile Ubuntu One clients).

Today Ohloh finished importing the Launchpad source code and produced the first source code analysis report. There seems to be something fishy about the reported line counts (e.g. -3,291 lines of SQL), but the commit counts and contributor list look about right. If you're interested in what sort of effort goes into producing an application like Launchpad, then it is worth a look. Comments: e - 27 Oct, 2009 Have you seen the perl language?

I promised Zeeshan that I'd have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so. For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I've put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~jamesh/+archive/upnp Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch.

Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you've already used the code. Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django's django.

Yesterday, Thomas rolled the 0.13 release of Storm, which can be downloaded from Launchpad. Storm is the object relational mapper for Python used by Launchpad and Landscape, so it is capable of supporting quite large scale applications. It is seven months since the last release, so there is a lot of improvements. Here are a few simple statistics: 0.12 0.13 Change Tarball size (KB) 117 155 38 Mainline revisions 213 262 49 Revisions in ancestry 552 875 323 So it is a fairly significant update by any of these metrics.

From 2004 to 2008, I worked on the Launchpad code hosting site for Canonical. As well as providing hosting for third party Open Source projects, the site is central to the Ubuntu project: doing everything from bug tracking to managing the package repository.

It has been a while coming, but MySQL has announced their move to Bazaar for version control. This has been a long time coming, and it is great to finally see it announced publicly. The published Bazaar branches include 8 years of history going back to MySQL 3.23.22, imported from the BitKeeper repositories. So you can see a lot more than just the history since the switch: you can use all the normal Bazaar tools to see where the code came from and how it evolved.

Last week we moved psycopg from Subversion to Bazaar. I did the migration using Gustavo Niemeyer's svn2bzr tool with a few tweaks to map the old Subversion committer IDs to the email address form conventionally used by Bazaar. The tool does a good job of following tree copies and create related Bazaar branches. It doesn't have any special handling for stuff in the tags/ directory (it produces new branches, as it does for other tree copies).

Yesterday I performed the migration of Inkscape's bugs from SourceForge.net to Launchpad. This was a full import of all their historic bug data – about 6900 bugs. As the import only had access to the SF user names for bug reporters, commenters and assignees, it was not possible to link them up to existing Launchpad users in most cases. This means that duplicate person objects have been created with email addresses like $USERNAME@users.

I am at Narita Airport at the moment, on the way to Boston for some of the meetings being held during UDS. It'll be good to catch up with everyone again. Hopefully this trip won't be as eventful as the previous one to Florida :)

When Storm was released, one of the comments made was that it did not include the ability to generate a database schema from the Python classes used to represent the tables while this feature is available in a number of competing ORMs. The simple reason for this is that we haven't used schema generation in any of our ORM-using projects. Furthermore I'd argue that schema generation is not really appropriate for long lived projects where the data stored in the database is important.

This week I am in Florida for a Launchpad sprint. I was meant to arrive on Sunday night, but I fell asleep in the boarding lounge and missed the San Francisco → Orlando flight (the flight out of Perth was an early morning one, and I didn't get enough sleep on the plane). The earliest alternative fligh was the same time the next day, so I ended up ariving on Monday night.

The new Canonical Shop was opened recently which allows you to buy anything from Ubuntu tshirts and DVDs up to a 24/7 support contract for your server. One thing to note is that this is the first site using our new Launchpad single sign-on infrastructure. We will be rolling this out to other sites in time, which should give a better user experience to the existing shared authentication system currently in place for the wikis.

This article follows on from the series of tutorials on using Bazaar that I have neglected for a while. This article is about the bundle feature of Bazaar. Bundles are to Bazaar branches what patches are to tarballs or plain source trees. Context/unified diffs and the patch utility are arguably one of most important inventions that enable distributed development: The patch is a self contained text file, making it easy to send as an email attachment or attach to a bug report.

This week at the EuroPython conference, Gustavo Niemeyer announced the release of Storm and gave a tutorial on using it. Storm is a new object relational mapper for Python that was developed for use in some Canonical projects, and we've been working on moving Launchpad over to it. I'll discuss a few of the nice features of the package: Loose Binding Between Database Connections and Classes Storm has a much looser binding between database connections and the classes used to represent records in particular tables.

I've just released a new version of gnome-vfs-obexftp, which includes the features discussed previously. It can be downloaded from: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-vfs-obexftp/0.3/ The highlights of the release include: Sync osso-gwobex and osso-gnome-vfs-extras changes from Maemo Subversion. Instead of asking hcid to set up the RFCOMM device for communication, use an RFCOMM socket directly. This is both faster and doesn't require enabling experimental hcid interfaces. Based on work from Bastien Nocera. Improve free space calculation for Nokia phones with multiple memory types (e.

Today we unveiled the Launchpad 1.0 User Interface, which has been in private beta for the last few months. As well as the improved visual appearance, there are a number of new features such as the ability to add your own branding to Launchpad pages associated with your project (for example, Ubuntu's pages). As mentioned in the press release, we've got two new high profile projects using us for bug tracking: The Zope 3 Project and The Silva Content Management System.

Recently, the SchoolTool project has migrated to Launchpad for their bug tracker. We performed an import of all their previous bug reports using a new bug importer I wrote. This was the third Launchpad bug importer I'd written (the previous ones being for the Ubuntu Bugzilla import and a SourceForge importer), so I wanted this one to be the last. So the design of this importer was to have a simple XML format as an intermediate step.

Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on 21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated tzdata packages were released on 27th November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn't been an updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug 72125). One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database.

One of the things we've been working on for Launchpad is good integration with Bazaar. Launchpad provides a way to register or host Bazaar branches, and nominate a Bazaar branch as representing a particular product series. For each registered branch, there is a branch information page. This leads to a bit of confusion since Bazaar uses URLs to identify branches, so people try running bzr branch on a branch information page.

One of the new features in Firefox 2 is Microsummaries, which essentially allows dynamic bookmark titles. This is useful when bookmarking volatile pages, since the title can reflect the current state of the document rather than the state when the bookmark was created. The system works by registering XSLT transformations that generate a simple text string from the page content. The registrations are either done via a <link> element, or matched via regular expressions.

When outlining the use of team branches on Launchpad previously, I used the --create-prefix option when pushing the branch to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net. This was to make sure the initial push would succeed, even if the /\~username/product directory the branch would be created in didn't exist. To simplify things for users, we made a change to the SFTP server in the latest release, so that --create-prefix is no longer necessary. This does not affect the allowed branch directories though: the structure is used to associate the branches with products, and decide who can write to the branches.

Earlier in the year, we migrated the bugs from bugzilla.ubuntu.com over to Launchpad. This process involved changes to the bug numbers, since the Launchpad is used for more than just Ubuntu and already had a number of bugs reported in the system. People often refer to other bugs in comments, which both Bugzilla and Launchpad conveniently turn into links. The changed bug numbers meant that the bug references in the comments ended up pointing to the wrong bugs.

Earlier, David Allouche described how to host Bazaar branches on Launchpad. At the end, he alluded to the ability to create branches that can be committed to by anyone on a team. I'll describe how this works here. Launchpad Teams Launchpad allows people to organise themseleves into teams. Most of the things people can do in Launchpad can also be done by teams, including owning branches. You can create a new team at the following page:

The Python developers have been looking for a new bug tracker, and essentially put out a tender for people interested in providing a bug tracker. Recently I have been working on getting Launchpad's entry ready, which mainly involved working on SourceForge import. The entry is now up, and our demonstration server is up and running with a snapshot of the Python bug tracker data. As a side effect of this, we've got fairly good SourceForge tracker import support now, which we should be able to use if other projects want to switch away from SF.

I'm in London at the moment with Carlos, Danilo, David and Steve for a Launchpad sprint focused on Bazaar and Rosetta. The weather is a nice change from Perth winter. Next week I'll be in Vilnius, Lithuania, and then it is back to London for another week before going home. It is a nice change from winter weather in Perth. Comments: Pupeno - 27 Jul, 2006 Hello, Since you seem to be a developer of Rosetta; to where should I send an 'official' feature request for having an easy or even automatic way of feeding-back the translations to mainstream projects ?

Have you wanted to play around with bzr but had nowhere to share your branches? You can now publish them through Launchpad. David Allouche provides the details. In short, you can upload branches to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/, and they will be published on http://bazaar.launchpad.net/.

Back in January I started working on a new Python wrapper for the GPGME library. I recently put out the first release: http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/pygpgme/0.1 This library allows you to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify messages in the OpenPGP format, using gpg as the backend. In general, it stays fairly close to the C API with the following changes: Represent C structures as Python classes where appropriate (e.g. contexts, keys, etc). Operations on those data types are converted to methods.

I've been in London for a bit over a week now at the Launchpad sprint. We've been staying in a hotel near the Excel exhibition centre in Docklands, which has a nice view of the docs and you can see the planes landing at the airport out the windows of the conference rooms. I met up with James Bromberger (one of the two main organisers of linux.conf.au 2003) on Thursday, which is the first time I've seen him since he left for the UK after the conference.

Launchpad got a mention in the latest Everybody Loves Eric Raymond comic. It is full of inaccuracies though — we use XML-RPC rather than SOAP. Comments: opi - 24 Feb, 2006 Oh, c'mon. It was quite fun. :-)

The Bugzilla migration on Friday went quite well, so we've now got all the old Ubuntu bug reports in Launchpad. Before the migration, we were up to bug #6760. Now that the migration is complete, there are more than 28000 bugs in the system. Here are some quick points to help with the transition: All bugzilla.ubuntu.com accounts were migrated to Launchpad accounts with a few caveats: If you already had a Launchpad account with your bugzilla email address associated with it, then the existing Launchpad account was used.

The migration is finally going to happen, after much testing of migration code and improvements to Malone. If all goes well, Ubuntu will be using a single bug tracker again on Friday (as opposed to the current system where bugs in main go in Bugzilla and bugs in universe go in Malone). Comments: Keshav - 17 Jan, 2006 Hiiii, I am Keshav and i am 22. I am working as software dev.

One of the things that was discussed at UBZ was moving Ubuntu's bug tracking over to Launchpad. The current situation sees bugs in main being filed in bugzilla while bugs in universe go in Launchpad. Putting all the bugs in Launchpad is an improvement, since users only need to go to one system to file bugs. I wrote the majority of the conversion script before the conference, but made a few important improvements at the conference after discussions with some of the developers.

The Python developers have been discussing a migration off CVS on the python-dev mailing list. During the discussion, Bazaar-NG was mentioned. A few posts of note: Mark Shuttleworth provides some information on the Bazaar roadmap. Importantly, Bazaar-NG will become Bazaar 2.0. Steve Alexander describes how we use Bazaar to develop Launchpad. This includes a description of the branch review process we use to integrate changes into the mainline. I'm going to have to play around with bzr a bit more, but it looks very nice (and should require less typing than baz .

Havoc: we are looking at ways to better integrate version control in Launchpad. There are many areas that could benefit from better use of version control, but I'll focus on bug tracking since you mentioned it. Take the attachment handling in Bugzilla, for instance. In non-ancient versions, you can attach statuses to attachments such as "obsolete" (which has some special handling in the UI — striking out obsolete attachments and making it easy to mark attachments as obsolete when uploading a new attachment).

I got back from the Launchpad sprint in São Carlos on Tuesday afternoon. It was hard work, but a lot of work got done. Launchpad is really coming together now, and will become even better as some of the things discussed at the sprint get implemented. One of the things discussed was to formalise some of the development workflow we've been using to develop Launchpad inside Launchpad itself so that it will be usable by other projects.