Launchpod: the Launchpad team podcast!

Host: Matthew Revell.
Theme: Obscurity by Barry Warsaw.

Launchpad will be open source on the 21st July this year!

Karl Fogel joined the Launchpad team recently as the Launchpad Ombudsman. Find out what that unusual job title means and hear Karl talk about the Launchpad team’s plans for going open source, our new development wiki and how we’re planning to build a community process around the newly open source Launchpad.

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Welcome to the last of our Twelve days of Launchpad series. For our final spin, we’ll take a look at an open source project that not only forms an important part of Launchpad but that you can also install locally or on your own server: Loggerhead!

Loggerhead gives you a web interface to Bazaar branches, allowing you to:

• browse a branch’s directory structure
• view files
• see diffs for each revision
• search files in the branch
• get the output of bzr annotate — crediting each line of code to its author.

You can use Loggerhead to view any branch in Launchpad by clicking the Source code tab on the branch’s overview page. Let’s see it in action on Drizzle’s trunk.

Have a click around and you’ll see that Loggerhead gives you an easy way to navigate a Bazaar branch and explore its history.

Running Loggerhead locally

That’s only part of the Loggerhead story, though, because you can install it on your own machines. You get everything you see on Loggerhead through Launchpad, as well as the ability to browse through all branches on your machine — rather than one branch at a time — plus the option of a beefed-up search.

Right now, Loggerhead is packaged for Debian and also for Ubuntu (in universe for Jaunty and the ~bzr PPA for other Ubuntu versions).

Once you’ve installed the package — see our guide if you’re new to installing from PPAs — open a terminal, visit a directory where you have some Bazaar branches and enter:

$ serve-branches

Then, visit http://localhost:8080. That’s it: you can now browse around and use Loggerhead as a friendly interface to your Bazaar branches.

Get involved

If you have questions about Loggerhead — or you want to contribute — you can find the project on Launchpad and talk to the Loggerhead team using the Bazaar mailing list.

Hi,

Today we have updated the Launchpad Legal page [1] with the following changes:

1) The Dev wiki [2] is now called out explicitly as having a CC content license.  Previously the Dev wiki proclaimed it was licensed under CC but was not listed on our Legal page.

2) The Content License section was updated for clarity. This was a housekeeping task and does not effect any Legal changes.

3) Future notifications of legal changes will be sent only to the Launchpad Announcement list [3].  Previously they were sent to the Launchpad Users list and News blog.

Joey

[1] https://help.launchpad.net/Legal
[2] https://dev.launchpad.net/
[3] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Launchpad-announce

Often, if you’re trying out a new feature — or you want to show someone how to do something — it’s likely you want to use real data but without having a lasting effect.

Launchpad’s staging environment allows you to do just that. Staging’s database is refreshed once each day by making a complete copy of the main Launchpad database. That means you can try things out but you don’t have to worry about spoiling real data or adding lots of useless test data. Within 24 hours, any changes you make on staging are wiped out by a fresh copy of the main Launchpad database. Just make sure you don’t do anything on staging that you want to keep

One thing to note is that staging runs the very latest code from the Launchpad developers so you may notice bugs from time to time. Of course, if you do spot a bug, please report it.

Karma is a shorthand way of showing how active someone is in Launchpad. If you have a Launchpad account then you also have a karma score.

Karma is simple: roughly speaking, the higher someone’s karma score, the more active they are in Launchpad. There are a couple of things to note, though:

• karma decays: something you did six months ago earns you less karma than something you did today
• not all actions are equal: some work earns you more karma than other work.

There’s more about karma in our help guide.