News and announcements

Launchpad 10.01: bug heat

Written for Launchpad Suite by Matthew Revell on 2010-01-28

The Launchpad team is proud to announce Launchpad 10.01, released on
January 27th 2010!

Highlights this month include:

 * Bug heat: a new estimate of each bug's likely impact.
 * Improved patch handling on bug reports.
 * Anonymous read-only access to the Launchpad web service API.

Let's take a look in detail.

Bug heat
---------

You can get extra help in judging a bug's significance by using Launchpad's
new bug heat measure.

In the top-right of bug pages, and in a new column on bug listings, you'll see
four flame icons. The more of those flames are lit, the "hotter" the bug is.

Launchpad measures a bug's heat depending on how many people are subscribed,
whether it’s a security issue, how many people have marked the bug as
affecting them, and so on.

Here are Ubuntu's bugs, sorted by bug heat:

  http://tinyurl.com/y9l4zvd

And here's a bug report that has all four flames lit:

  http://tinyurl.com/cxgaox

For the detail of how Launchpad calculates bug heat, see our development wiki:

  https://dev.launchpad.net/Bugs/BugHeat#Algorithm

New bug patch notifications and icons
--------------------------------------

In bug listings, there's a new sticking plaster icon that shows you which bugs
have a patch attached.

Also, Launchpad will now email you when someone attaches a patch to a bug to
which you're subscribed.

Anonymous web service API access
---------------------------------

Leonard blogs that:

  Your launchpadlib scripts can now get read-only access to the Launchpad web
  service API without going through any authorization process. Previously,
  to authorize your script, you had to open a web page in the end-user's web
  browser and get the user to click a button. Now, you only have to go through
  that process if you want to access someone's private data or modify the
  Launchpad dataset on their behalf.

Read his full post at:

  http://blog.launchpad.net/?p=1279

Community contributions
------------------------

Thanks to Launchpad community members Jamal Fainan, Willian Grant, Brian
Murray and Adi Roiban whose code landed in Launchpad during the 10.01 cycle.

There's more detail here:

  https://dev.launchpad.net/Contributions

New contributors are always welcome. Find out more on the Launchpad dev wiki:

  https://dev.launchpad.net

Also in Launchpad 10.01
------------------------

You can find full details of the 10.01 release here:

  https://launchpad.net/launchpad-project/+milestone/10.01

See you next time
------------------

We're now using a new numbering scheme for Launchpad's releases. We've chosen
something similar to the Ubuntu style, whereby our release numbers start with
the year, followed by the number of releases so far in that year.

Launchpad 10.02 is due on the 3rd of March 2010.

You can see our full release calendar here:

  https://dev.launchpad.net/Releases/2010Calendar

You can also stay up to date with the latest from the Launchpad team on our
blog:

  http://blog.launchpad.net

And for a fuller view of the Launchpad community, take a look at the new
Planet Launchpad:

  http://planet.launchpad.net

As always, you can join us in #launchpad on Freenode and on the
launchpad-users mailing list:

  https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-users

Launchpad 3.1.12

Written for Launchpad Suite by Matthew Revell on 2009-12-17

The Launchpad team is proud to announce Launchpad 3.1.12, released on
December 16th 2009!

Let's take a look at what's new in this release.

Patches now highlighted on bug report pages
--------------------------------------------

Now you can easily see all the patches attached to a bug, separately
from other types of attachment.

When you attach a patch to a bug, Launchpad gives it a new patch icon
and there's also a separate sidebar box that lists all patches attached
to the bug.

Take a look at Deryck's blog post for more:

  http://blog.launchpad.net/bug-tracking/better-patch-tracking-and-more

Now see how many people have clicked "This bug affects me"
-----------------------------------------------------------

For a while now, you've been able to register that a bug report affects
you, by following a link on the bug report page.

Now you can use that data! Bug report pages now show you how many people
have stated that the bug affects them.

And as before, when you're searching for bugs, you can sort the results
by the number of people affected.

Community contributions
------------------------

Thanks to Launchpad community members Adi Roiban, Jonathan Davies and
Luke Farone whose code landed in Launchpad during the 3.1.12 cycle.

There's more detail here:

  https://dev.launchpad.net/Contributions

New contributors are always welcome. Talk to us on launchpad-dev mailing
list:

  https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev

Also in Launchpad 3.1.12
-------------------------

You can find full details of the 3.1.12 release here:

  https://launchpad.net/launchpad-project/+milestone/3.1.12

See you next time
------------------

The first Launchpad release of 2010 is due towards the end of January.

We'll be publishing our 2010 release calendar soon on our blog:

  http://blog.launchpad.net

As always, you can join us in #launchpad on Freenode and on the
launchpad-users mailing list:

  https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-users

Launchpad 3.1.10 releases

Written for Launchpad Suite by Matthew Revell on 2009-11-05

The Launchpad team is proud to announce Launchpad 3.1.10, released on November 5th 2009!

Read more

Launchpad 3.0 is here! New UI and more

Written for Launchpad Suite by Matthew Revell on 2009-09-22

The Launchpad team is proud to announce the release of Launchpad 3.0!

Highlights in this release include:

    * a new clearer web interface with in-line editing
    * personal translation dashboards: see what needs your attention
    * automatically updated diffs during code reviews.

Read more

Launchpad 2.2.7 released

Written for Launchpad Suite by Matthew Revell on 2009-07-22

The Launchpad team is proud to announce Launchpad 2.2.7!

Launchpd 2.2.7 was rolled out this past week and includes:

 * Sharing translations between different releases
 * Automatic merge of project translations to a Bazaar branch
 * Automatically import release files using product release finder
 * Answer contacts can now assign questions
 * Browse package branches that are being uploaded
 * Source code :-)

Read on for more...

Sharing translations between different releases
-----------------------------------------------

Message sharing between different releases of a product or distribution
in Launchpad means that translations done in one release (e.g., trunk)
would immediately apply to translations in another release (e.g.,
stable). This should benefit almost all projects that use Launchpad for
translations.

  * Translators don't have to worry about back-porting translation fixes
    to older releases anymore. They can simply translate the latest
    release; translations will automatically propagate to older
    releases. Also, this works both ways: if you are translating a
    current stable release, newer development release will get those
    updates too!

  * For project maintainers who host their translations in Launchpad,
    when they upload a template to a new release series and it gets
    imported, it will instantly get all existing translations from
    previous releases shared with the new series. Translators won't
    have to re-do their work; They won't have to upload correct versions
    of translated PO files, they can just care about POT files instead.

  * For Ubuntu, there's another benefit: opening a new release for
    translations will take minutes instead of days. Message sharing
    also improves the scalability of the system, and we should soon
    start seeing more performance improvements as the result of
    migrating to this new way of managing translations.

  * If you don't want a particular release to use a shared message, you
    can disable sharing for that message in that release.

See Danilo Šegan's blog post for details:

  http://blog.launchpad.net/translations/sharing-translations

Automatic merge of project translations to a Bazaar branch
----------------------------------------------------------

Launchpad can now commit regular snapshots of your project's
translations to a Bazaar branch of your choice. No more waiting for the
email with the URL! The latest snapshot will always be waiting in the
same place for you to download it. We're doing daily snapshots at
first, though we may change that later depending on usage.

Here's what you do:

You create a branch in Launchpad, of the "Hosted" variety. That means
that the branch lives on Launchpad itself; it can't be mirrored from
somewhere else. (You may need to "bzr init" and "bzr push" an empty
directory from your local machine to get the branch properly set up.)

Then go to the Translations tab for your project. Go to the release
series that you want snapshots of, e.g., trunk.

On the Translations tab for that release series you'll see an option,
"Settings." There, at the bottom, you'll be able to set a translations
export branch. Pick any branch that you own; it doesn't have to be
related to the project.

A word of caution: whatever branch you pick here, Launchpad is going to
commit files to it. It will ruthlessly overwrite any previous versions
of the files. So you probably don't want to use your development branch
for this, or any other branch that you use for other things. We
recommend that you create an fresh branch, and don't use it for anything
else but getting translation snapshots of a single release series.

Automatically import release files using product release finder
---------------------------------------------------------------

The product release finder process runs daily to locate new releases and
import them to Launchpad. It uses each series' release file pattern to
locate files and import them to the appropriate release, and can even
create releases for series.

The project owner and series release manager can set the Release URL
pattern on the series edit page. The pattern is an "ftp", "http", or
"https" URL with a glob (*) in the part of the file name that varies per
release. For example:

   http://widgets.dom/downloads/widget-2.*

describes all files that start with "widget-2.". This might be the
source for two different releases: "widget-2.1.tar.gz" and
"widget-2.2.3.tar.gz". The pattern will also match multiple files that
belong to a single release, such as "widget-2.1.tar.gz",
"widget-2.1.zip", and "widget-2.1.changelog".

Many projects choose to group files in series in a dedicated directory,
in which case the Release URL pattern would look something like this:

   http://widgets.dom/downloads/2.8/*

You can tell the product release finder to search multiple directories
by using a glob for a directory. For example, if your project separates
release files into directories by OS, then you can use

   http://widgets.dom/downloads/*/widget-2.*

to scan "downloads/ubuntu/widget-2.*" and "downloads/mac/widget-2.*".

Be careful to include the common part of the series in the URL,
otherwise files from different series will be imported to the wrong
series. Do not do something like:

   http://widgets.dom/all-releases/*

because any file that looks like it has version information in it will
be imported to one series.

In all cases, the product release finder will extract the version from
the file name, and match it to a milestone name. It will create the
milestone and release it if necessary. If a version cannot be
extracted, the file is simply ignored.

The version numbers extracted from file names will be converted to
conform to Launchpad URL name rules. So if your release files have
underscores or plus signs in their version names, dashes will be
substituted. Flavour information is also ignored in the file name. For
example these file names yield these versions:

   emacs-21.10.tar.gz ==> 21.10
   vpnc-0.2-rm+zomb-pre1.tar.gz ==> 0.2-rm-zomb-pre1
   warzone2100-2.0.5_rc1.tar.bz2 ==> 2.0.5-rc1
   furiusisomount-0.8.1.0_de_DE.tar.gz ==> 0.8.1.0
   glow-0.2.1_i386.deb ==> 0.2.1
   Bazaar-1.16.1.win32-py2.5.exe ==> 1.16.1

See Curtis Hovey's blog post for more information:

  http://blog.launchpad.net/cool-new-stuff/automatically-import-files-to-launchpad-using-product-release-finder

Answer contacts can now assign questions
----------------------------------------

Question listing now includes the assignee column. Answer contacts can
assign a question to a user via the edit page. The assigned user will
receive a notification about the assigned question. An assigned
question will never expire; the assignee is obligated to answer the
question. (Launchpad has supported assigning questions to users for
several years, but the privilege was limited to project owners. This
meant the feature was rarely used. Since the feature was also not
visible, answer contacts often requested that we develop the feature.)

Curtis Hovey's blog post has more details, and more background on how
the Launchpad team came to understand the need for this feature:

  http://blog.launchpad.net/general/answer-contacts-can-assign-questions

Browse package branches that are being uploaded
-----------------------------------------------

You can now browse the package branches that are being uploaded. They
can be seen for the entire distro:

  https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu

Or for a distroseries:

  https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic

And there's a new view for a source package in a distribution that
groups the distroseries branches:

  https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apturl

Source code
-----------

The Launchpad source code, that is. Launchpad was open-sourced shortly
before the rollout of Launchpad 2.2.7, so this is the first release of
Launchpad to come with full source code. See this blog post for more:

  http://blog.launchpad.net/general/launchpad-is-now-open-source

Also in release 2.2.7
---------------------

For full details of the bugfixes and blueprints that make up Launchpad
2.2.7, visit its milestone page:

  https://launchpad.net/launchpad-project/+milestone/2.2.7

If you come across a bug, please report it here:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad

See you next time
-----------------

Launchpad 3.0 is due on the 21st of September. See the releases
calendar for more:

  https://dev.launchpad.net/Releases/2009Calendar

In the meantime, stay up to date with Launchpad news and views
through our blog:

  http://blog.launchpad.net

As always, you can join us in channel #launchpad on irc.freenode.net and
on the launchpad-users mailing list:

  https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-users

For development discussion, come to channel #launchpad-dev on
irc.freenode.net or to the launchpad-dev mailing list:

  https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev

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