–create-prefix not needed with bazaar.launchpad.net

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. Another change included in the rollout is the ability to rename branches and reassign them to different owners through the web interface. So for instance, you can give ownership of a personal branch to a team your project grows to multiple developers. This should be used sparingly, since it will change the published branch URLs which can confuse people using your branch.

Ubuntu Bugzilla Migration Comment Cleanup

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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. The bug import was done one bug at a time, so if bug A referred to bug B but bug B hadn't been imported by the time we were importing bug A, then we wouldn't know what bug number it should be referring to. The solution we used was to just insert a link to the bug watch URL (e.g. https://launchpad.net/malone/bugtrackers/ubuntu-bugzilla/$BUGID), which allowed people to find the referenced bug, but was a bit ugly. Today we ran a fixup script to remove these bug watch URLs from comments and rewrite the old Bugzilla bug numbers to the current Launchpad bug numbers. This cleans up the old imported bugs a bit so they fit in better with the bugs entered directly into Launchpad.

Shared Branches using Bazaar and Launchpad

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: https://launchpad.net/people/+newteam There are three different membership policies you can choose from: Open: anyone can join. Choosing this sort of team effectively gives everyone write access to branches owned by the team. Moderated: new memberships must be approved by one of the administrators (this is the default policy). This makes it easy for people to request commit access to the branch while still requiring approval from a team administrator.. Restricted: new members can only be added by the team administrators. This is appropriate if new members shouldn't be able to propose themselves normally. Once the team has been created, members of the team can create the branches. Uploading a Team Owned Branch Now that you are a member of a team, you can upload branches to that team's directory on bazaar.launchpad.net. This is done in the same way as uploading personal branches described in David's article: cd branchdir bzr push --create-prefix sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/~teamname/product/branchname When the command completes, the team owned branch will have been created. Now you can treat this branch like a personal branch, but once someone else pushes a commit to the branch, "bzr push" will tell you that the branch has diverged, and not let you push your changes until you merge them to your branch. An alternative model is to use checkouts, which provide a workflow closer to CVS and Subversion without losing Bazaar's ability to work while disconnected. Bazaar Checkouts A Bazaar checkout is a local working copy bound to a remote branch such that changes are committed to the remote location. The remote branch data is also cached locally to speed up local operations and allow you to work while disconnected from the network. A checkout of the previously created team branch can be created with the following command: bzr checkout sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/~teamname/product/branchname team-branch cd team-branch Alternatively if you still have the local branch used to create the team branch, it can be converted to a checkout with the "bzr bind" command: cd branchdir bzr bind sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/~teamname/product/branchname You can then make commits to the checkout as you would with any other branch, provided the checkout is up to date with the remote branch. If another team member has committed to the branch in the mean time though, you will be prompted to update your checkout to the head of the latest version of the remote branch. If this happens, the checkout can be updated by issuing the "bzr update" command. You can then retry the commit, after fixing any conflicts that are reported. Disconnected Operation with Checkouts If you are disconnected…

Launchpad enterered into Python bug tracker competition

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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.

In London

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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.