Articles
Concluding the bridging the gap theme
Many people have noticed application pages are changing on Launchpad. The pages might state that Launchpad does not know where a service is hosted, or the layout looks more like the common Launchpad design. These changes are a part of the final feature the Launchpad Registry team is contributing to …
Remixing Ubuntu using Launchpad
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 …
I am still disappointed by Launchpad's page headers
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 …
Essential Source Package information
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 …
Launchpad bug tracker paper cuts
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 …
Speeding up page loads
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 …
Being a Launchpad Registry Admin
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 …
Proposed Launchpad bug configuration page
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 …
Launchpad CSS is like a Jackson Pollok painting
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 …
Hacking on trivial Launchpad bugs
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 …