Something more than nothing
Tue 24 Aug 2010
Remixing Ubuntu using Launchpad
Posted by curtis under Launchpad
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Creating an Ubuntu remix is a big effort that requires the orchestration of a lot of small pieces. Many users assume they want to create a project or distribution to manage this, but neither can manage all the pieces. I recommend using a Project Group to manage the unique parts of the remix, and [...]
Mon 28 Jun 2010
I am still disappointed by Launchpad’s page headers
Posted by curtis under Launchpad
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I recently investigated some spurious errors running some locale tests. The tests failed because there was no page title, which may come from an obsolete pagetitles module, or from the view class. Reading the source code side tracked me for an hour and I cannot get it out of my head, so I think need [...]
Thu 17 Jun 2010
Essential Source Package information
Posted by curtis under Launchpad
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Have you ever tried to register a project for a source package in launchpad? You probably wanted to locate the upstream bug tracker or get the latest code. You were probably thinking that Launchpad has a lot of the information. You could copy some information from the package, then add the repository and bug tracking [...]
Thu 10 Jun 2010
Launchpad bug tracker paper cuts
Posted by curtis under Launchpad
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I have been doing a lot of work in the Launchpad bug tracker recently. Reading bug reports and code remind me of my own frustrations using the Launchpad bug tracker.
Bug reports include deactivated projects. I have seen bugs that affect more than one project, and one is deactivated. I get a 404 when I navigate [...]
Tue 18 May 2010
Speeding up page loads
Posted by curtis under Launchpad
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I have been fixing Launchpad page timeouts. This is traditionally solved by optimising queries, but in the case of timeouts related to milestones, the problem in in the Python code. The primary reason milestones are slow is that bugs are shown or summarised, which requires repetitive permission checks. The secondary reason is the number of [...]
Wed 12 May 2010
Over the past few months, it occurred to me that by a confluence of Launchpad responsibilities, I am the God-Emperor of Launchpad Registry Admins. I never intended to take this role. I certainly did not covet it. I just realised that there were a lot of data issues in Launchpad that I personally had [...]
Fri 30 Apr 2010
The registry team is going to work on some long standing issues in the Launchpad bug domain. We are going to create a single page to configure the handling for projects. We have a draft of the proposed changes that shows that the bug expiration and remote project fields are subordinate to the choice of [...]
Tue 27 Apr 2010
Launchpad CSS is like a Jackson Pollok painting
Posted by curtis under Launchpad
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I was migrating old CSS styles to Launchpads YUI-based style sheet a few days ago. I became lost in the new style sheet, and I was confused by what appeared to be duplicate or contradictory styles. I spent my evening reordering the styles by selector types instead of by application uses
When I was done [...]
Fri 23 Apr 2010
Hacking on trivial Launchpad bugs
Posted by curtis under Launchpad
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The Launchpad registry team has a zero-trivial bugs policy. Last year we observed that trivial bugs, though they are often low priority, they have the highest certainty to be fixed and are very visible to users. We decided that since an engineer can close 8 bugs in a day of work, there should never be [...]
Tue 20 Apr 2010
Fixing project licenses using the suggested Ubuntu packages portlet
Posted by curtis under Launchpad
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On Sunday I did an experiment to see how quickly I could provide the license information for old projects owned by the Registry Admins. There were 768 projects that I had the power to fix. Locating the license information is hard if you only know the upstream project. The copyright file in debian source package [...]