Code in Launchpad

Launchpad offers many things to developers, and open source software developers in particular. One of these things is the ability to host Bazaar branches. For those that have looked a little deeper, they will have noticed that there are four types of branches in Launchpad: Hosted; Mirrored; Remote; and Imported. Hmm, this isn't really what I was intending to talk about at all, but I'm going to go with the flow.

Hosted branches are those where Launchpad is the primary public location of the branch. Hosted branches are normally created by pushing a branch directly to Launchpad. Before you do that though, you need to have registered on Launchpad, and supplied an SSH key. This is how Launchpad knows who you are. There are two ways you can push a branch to Launchpad: one is via SFTP; and the other using the Bazaar smart server (bzr+ssh).

As an example I'm going to use my alias-command bzr branch. The complete SFTP location would be sftp://thumper@bazaar.launchpad.net/~thumper/bzr/alias-command, and the smart server one bzr+ssh://thumper@bazaar.launchpad.net/~thumper/bzr/alias-command. These are a bit unwieldy, so we extended the lp type urls for bzr to support writing if the launchpad plug-in knows who you are. In order for you to do this you use the lp-login command. bzr lp-login will tell you the username that is currently set. If you have not done this yet, you'll see a message like "No Launchpad user ID configured." I set mine by saying bzr lp-login thumper. This stores thumper as the launchpad_username in the bazaar.conf file. This also means I can use bzr push lp:~thumper/bzr/alias-command to push to my hosted Launchpad branch.

Mirrored branches allow you to have your branches stored publicly in some location that you control, and you let Launchpad know where this is. Launchpad will then update its copy of your branch every six hours. This is handy if you don't have an SSH key, or you have a slow network connection, or you just like having your branches available on your own server.

Remote branches are a bit different. Remote branches were sort of created out of necessity. Some people were registering mirrored branches with unreachable locations. Some of these were possibly by mistake, but quite a few were obviously inaccessible. But more strange is that those branches were linked to bugs or blueprints. There was obviously a desire to have branch meta-data there, but not actually allow Launchpad to get access to the branches. So we have remote branches. You cannot get a copy of a remote branch from Launchpad as Launchpad does not have a copy of it.

Imported branches are those branches where Launchpad get the code from either CVS or Subversion, and puts it into a Bazaar branch. I was really wanting to talk about this as I saw two projects recently where we are importing code that I didn't know about. One is my favourite music player, Amarok, and the other was MPlayer. Just out of curiosity I looked at both of these branches on Launchpad. The Amarok one has 12195 revisions as I'm writing this, and the last revision was 11 hours old, and MPlayer had even more revisions, at 26761. However that isn't even the cool bit. What is really nifty is you can go bzr branch lp:amarok or bzr branch lp:mplayer to get the code. Just to check I did just that, and got a copy of the amarok source. It was the first bit of C++ I had looked at in a long time (it used to be all I did).

Anyway, that was what I really wanted to say. Oh yeah, and bzr rocks.

The Launchpad branch directory service

Recently Bazaar grew a branch directory service. This allows plug-in developers to define custom "protocols" that resolve the branch names into some other branch location.

The Launchpad plug-in defines a protocol "lp". Launchpad uses the other parts of the URL to relate to projects, series or individual's branches. The shortest valid URL for Launchpad is something like lp:do. You can also use an empty authority (or site part of a URL), so lp:///do is exactly the same, just longer. Personally I prefer the one without all the slashes.

The do part of the branch location relates to the GNOME Do project on Launchpad. There is a little magic (a.k.a. configuration) that is needed to make this work. Projects in Launchpad get an initial development focus series created for them. This is intended to relate to the branch of development that is where current or new work goes. In order to have the code available through the Launchpad directory service, the code has to be available through Launchpad as a normal branch.

Once a branch has been either hosted, mirrored or imported for the project, one of the people responsible for the project in Launchpad can relate the branch with the series. Once this is done the branch is easily accessible. People that have permission to make these links will be shown a link on the main code tab for their project (we don't taunt people who can't make the links with an invalid option).

If there is another series, say 1.0 for our project fooix, and we have branches associated with them, then we could get the 1.0 branch using lp:fooix/1.0. Normal Launchpad branches are also accessible using the lp protocol using lp:~username/project/branch-name.

The December push-up challenge

Yay, finished early. We had a challenge running at Canonical to do 2000 push-ups during December. I've just done my 2000th push-up for the month. It has actually been quite good. I've found that the most important bit is just to do a set regularly, and really try for four or five sets a day.

Also I've finished work for the year. Another yay! It has been a good year, with much good stuff getting done. Even more interesting stuff is due to come out in the first six months of next year.

With another year heading past, the girls are a year older. Jessie is starting school in February next year at the start of term, and Maia is now old enough to go to playcentre by herself (and she has done so at least once).

It seems time to start thinking about new year resolutions...

Cambridge, MA

Well, my body is now almost completely adjusted to US east coast time. I do find myself waking each night between two and three in the morning. I'm thinking that this might be due to me expecting to hear Jessie or Caitlin waking, but here it is only Joey.

The rest of the Launchpadders arrived tonight. I ended up meeting so many of them it isn't really worth me writing them down for fear of forgetting someone. We have the agile training tomorrow, which should be quite interesting.

Cambridge, or the small bits of it that I have seen, reminds me of London. But perhaps that is just because they are digging up the roads all over the place, and the pavement is made up of concrete slabs and bricks that have been laid for so long that they are no longer flat.

I thought the USA was supposed to be cheap, but so far the meals out in the evening have been about the same that I'd pay back in NZ (converting the dollars). However generally books and DVDs are cheaper. I've put through an order to amazon.com and getting it delivered to the hotel.

Trivialities

Well the laptop has been running mostly well since I upgraded it. Just a few times when it really had problems. Most of those seem to have been solved by making KDE start a fresh session every time rather than trying to use what I had running last time. It means a bit of manual tweaking each time I log in, but I tend to just leave it on most of the time.

I have Jono and James here this week working with me and we are attacking both features and usability issues with Launchpad and Bazaar. I feel that things are coming along nicely.

I've just joined a squash club, but yet to organise my first game. I know that I'll be really stiff after the first smack around.

Going gutsy

I upgraded my desktop machine to Gutsy (Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10) several weeks ago, and it has been going reasonably well, so it is time to upgrade the laptop. The distribution upgrader application happily told me that I needed to download around 1.4 gig of updates that would take around 2 days 7 hours using a 56K modem. I'm happy that I have a decent ADSL connection, although it is still saying that it has got between 4 and 7 hours remaining depending on the current download speed.

The official Gutsy release candidate is in about a week or two. If you feel so inclined, you too can upgrade and help report bugs.

I just wish I could figure out how to use my favourite window picker that beryl has that compiz doesn't seem to (or at least I haven't found it yet).

Rediscovering stuff

When we left for the UK we only took a couple of suitcases. After a number of years away we sold our house and put much stuff in storage. This stuff has just been delivered to our house.

There is much cool stuff there. As I was helping the guys get the stuff out of the van, I grabbed a box that said "Glass, Fragile" and it was somewhat squashed and at the bottom of a pile. Yes there was a broken glass vase in there, but I haven't gone through everything yet.

I did find a copy of "Ferdinand" that was given to me back in 1975. It is in quite good nick given its age.

More unpacking to happen this weekend I guess.