As a part of the Increase Apport Adoption specification we are going to kick off an experiment and redirect all of Ubuntu’s /+filebug links in Launchpad to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs. This change has been tested on staging.launchpad.net already and will be landing shortly on edge.launchpad.net (There will be a +filebug?no-redirect if you really really need it).

If you review the specification and the documentation bug reporters will be redirected to, you will notice that we spent a lot of time and energy on ensuring that we improve the quality of bugs when they are reported. The time many of us spend on triaging very incomplete bugs is not sustainable given the volume of bug reports. Having reporters use ubuntu-bug (apport more specifically) to report bugs will reduce many of these problems for us.

In order to make the transition for our users smoother, we’d like to ask you to help out with a few things:

1. If you take care of a high-profile package, consider adding it to
   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage which is linked to from
   https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs.

2. Please consider writing an apport hook for the packages you take care of, if you need special information in bug reports - it’s REALLY easy: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport/DeveloperHowTo#Package%20Hooks
3. If the area of Ubuntu that you take care of is better suited by symptom based bug reporting (“storage”, “boot”, “install”, “sound”, etc.), consider contributing to the apport-symptoms package - it too is REALLY easy: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport/DeveloperHowTo#Symptoms

By helping us receive higher quality bug reports, we will help to make Ubuntu even better!

[Discuss the Launchpad Bug Filing Changes for Ubuntu on the Forums]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list by Brian Murray on Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 5:53 PM

Hi everyone — Launchpad is now open source.

Huge congrats (and thanks) to the Canonical Launchpad team, who worked overtime to make this happen sooner rather than later.

Note that although we announced previously that we’d be holding back two components (codehosting and soyuz), we changed our minds :-). They are opened too — all the code is open. Our public announcements are here:

http://blog.canonical.com/?p=192
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/canonical-open-sources-launchpad

The Canonical launchpad developers will be on IRC in #launchpad-dev on irc.freenode.net. For real time development discussion, that’s the place to go; for usage questions, #launchpad is still the channel, as before.

The development wiki is dev.launchpad.net. Right now, only Canonical people can edit it. We’ll expand the access list eventually, but just for these first few days I’d like to leave it tightly controlled because there will be a lot of eyeballs on it, and we need to figure out the right strategy to allow the good edits while preventing vandalism and spam. (I’ve run other wikis, and spam is *by far* the majority of all edits to any open wiki, so we’ll need to do that carefully.)

The mailing list is launchpad-dev {AT} lists.launchpad.net, which you can join by visiting https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev and joining the team there (a team and a mailing list are sort of the same thing in Launchpad). Again, that’s the development mailing list; user questions should still go to launchpad-users {AT} lists.launchpad.net.

Canonical is continuing to host Launchpad.net, of course, so we will vet and shepherd changes onto the production servers. The wiki explains the basics of how to learn your way around the code, make patches, and get code review; these processes will evolve organically, and we’ll keep the wiki updated as they do.

Note that the images/icons are still copyrighted traditionally, to protect Launchpad’s visual identity. But they’re shipped with the code and are fine to use for development and testing purposes. Just if you launch a production server, it needs to look different — and have a different name, of course, as “Launchpad” is a trademark. From our point of view, we’re doing this to improve our hosted service, so if you feel the need to run it on your own servers, that might mean we’re doing something wrong, in which case we hope you’ll tell us what.

Please bear with us as we learn how to be an open source team. Many of the Launchpad developers have open source experience of course, but as a team we’ve been working on Launchpad in-house for some years. This is a big change. We’re eager and ready, though.

That’s everything. Questions welcome, and patches too.

[Discuss Launchpad being Open Source on the Forums]

Originally sent to the launchpad-users mailing list by Karl Fogel on Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:31:57 -0700

The Launchpad team have released Launchpad 1.1.11! There are two big pieces of news this month!

• Personal Package Archives are now out of beta and available to all Launchpad users and teams. Find out more in the quick-start guide at help.launchpad.net/PPAQuickStart
• Launchpad Translations is now much quicker and rock-solid. The Launchpad team say to expect exports and imports in half the time and next to no timeouts.

See the Launchpad News blog for full details of the release.

Personal Package Archives is Launchpad’s new beta feature that builds and hosts Ubuntu .deb packages in your very own apt repository.

At 15.00 UTC on Thursday 13th September, the Launchpad and Ubuntu MOTU teams are jointly hosting PPA and Packaging 101. This IRC session in #launchpad will introduce you to:

• the basics of packaging for Ubuntu
• solving your dependencies from the relevant Ubuntu section - i.e. the ogre model
• version consistency between PPA and Ubuntu’s primary archive.

It’s also your opportunity to ask questions about PPA and get answers from the Launchpad and MOTU teams. If you want to see a particular topic covered, add it to the class’s agenda on the Launchpad help wiki.
See you there!

Join us in #launchpad and put your questions to the Launchpad team!

Agenda at: https://help.launchpad.net/UsersMeeting

This week the Launchpad team released version 1.1.8 of Launchpad. There’s a lot in this release to excite the Ubuntu community!

• The Personal Package Archives beta will soon be available to all members of the Launchpad Beta Testers team who have signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct.
• You can now see your individual translation import queue.
• If you host code branches with Launchpad, you can now specify which branch, if any, you intend to merge the code into.
• The bug tracker’s email interface now lets you set a bug’s tag.
• Also in the bug tracker, bug notification email headers now state which milestone the bug is targeted to.
• Work is underway to enable you to file bugs against packages in Canonical’s commercial repository.

Other highlights include a new “Deactivate your account” option, Trac bug statuses are correctly interpreted and the bug filing page has been overhauled.

One important note: searching in bug comments has been temporarily suspended, as it was causing timeouts. As soon as the problem is fixed, bug comment searching will return!

You can find out more in the Launchpad 1.1.8 in the release notes.

Come join the Launchpad team in the Launchpad users meeting! Ask anything you ever wanted to know about Launchpad.

Agenda at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaunchpadUserMeeting/2007-08-15#preview

Every project has frequently asked questions. Now, with the release of Launchpad 1.1.7, the Answer Tracker makes it easy to create and find answers to Ubuntu’s most common questions.

There are two ways to use FAQ in the Answer Tracker:

You’re looking for help: you can search and browse FAQ answers to find help with your problem.
You’re an Ubuntu answer contact: you can mark an answer as an FAQ and then create an answer that will be available to anyone else using the Answer Tracker.

The idea behind the FAQ feature is pretty simple: knowledge about Ubuntu is spread across the wiki, forums, third-party websites and the Answer Tracker. FAQ can draw on all that knowledge to offer Ubuntu users a canonical answer, at the same time as making life a little easier for answer contacts.

FAQ are available to all projects who use the Answer Tracker, not just Ubuntu. Find more about FAQ in the Answer Tracker in our FAQ quick-start guide!

Also in Launchpad 1.1.7

• Larger font size: visit launchpad.net and you’ll see that we’ve increased the size of the text used on the site, making it easier to read Launchpad’s default text size.
• New remote bug tracker support: Launchpad can now track bugs in the Mantis bug tracker. (Find out more)
• Improved duplicate bug handling: if someone has already reported the bug you’ve encountered it’s now much easier to select that report rather than create a duplicate.
• Teams can now set their default language: teams can become an answer contact for a specific language.
• Branch associations: you can now see all bugs, blueprints and subscribers associated with a branch on its branch associations page.

For full details of Launchpad 1.1.7, take a look at the release notes. And keep an eye on the Launchpad News blog to stay up to date with Launchpad!

One of the agenda items at UDS Sevilla was to improve the efficiency of Ubuntu’s bug workflow. If you work with Ubuntu bugs, you may already have noticed that some of the bug status names have changed:

• New: was Unconfirmed
• Incomplete: was Needs Info
• Invalid: was Rejected.

The meaning of these statuses hasn’t changed. However, there are two new bug statuses:

• Triaged: this bug has a complete report, has been confirmed and is ready to be fixed.
• Won’t Fix: this bug has been confirmed but, for whatever reason, won’t be fixed.

These two new statuses are available only to either a project’s owners or members of its Bug Contact team. So, in Ubuntu’s case it’s available to members of the Ubuntu Drivers and Ubuntu Bugs teams. This means that developers can view the Triaged queue knowing that an experienced triager considers those bug reports complete.

The Confirmed status still works, though, so it’s down to each project’s bug workflow policy to decide whether to use Triaged and Won’t Fix.

More people can nominate bugs

To relieve the bottle-neck caused by Ubuntu drivers being the only people able to nominate bugs for release, now anyone with the relevant upload permissions for a component can also nominate bugs in that component. For example: if a developer has upload permissions for universe, she can also nominate universe bugs for release.

Other highlights for the Ubuntu community

• Answer contacts will now receive notification of new questions in their preferred languages only.
• Team members can now renew their own memberships, when their membership is close to expiry if the team is set-up with an on-demand policy.
• Teams can now only join other teams with the approval of the first team’s administrator.
• It is now possible to see how many and which translations diverge from upstream.

Find out more

There’s plenty more to Launchpad 1.1.6, including the fabulous new Launchpad News blog! You can find the full release notes on the launchpad-users mailing list.

Add your questions for the Launchpad team to the meeting agenda.