As part of the Ubuntu App Showdown I started on a small project to provide a nice GUI frontend to Quickly.  While I was able to get it working and submitted before the contest deadline, I unfortunately didn’t have the time to make it do everything I wanted.  Since the end of the contest, however, I was able to spend a little more time adding some nice features to it.

Project Management

The majority of the work has gone into Quickly-Gtk’s project management.  Some of this was implemented already, such as the ability to switch the “current” project. But internally it was all kind of a mess of code to track that.  So I replaced all of that with a ProjectManager class that will store both the list of projects Quickly-Gtk knows about, but also keeps track of which project is “current”.  This class also implements Observer design pattern to let other parts of the code know about changes to both the list of projects and the current project.  This made it easy to, for example, display a notification on the screen whenever the current project was changed, regardless of whether it was changed in the window, the indicator, or from a Zeitgeist event.

Zeitgeist event monitoring

The other big development was integrating Quickly-Gtk with Zeitgeist.  For those that aren’t familiar with it, Zeitgeist is an event log that tracks all kinds of user activities and system events.  Applications can read past events or monitor them as they happen.  I wanted Quickly-Gtk to be smart enough to switch to a project as soon as the user started working on it, without requiring the user to make the switch themselves.  To do that, I set a Zeitgeist monitor to listen for file system events in any of the saved project directories.  I also set it to watch for the user viewing the project’s Launchpad page.  If any of those events happen, Quickly-Gtk will automatically make that the current project.

The future of Quickly-Gtk

While I was able to get a lot done with Quickly-Gtk, the underlying Quickly API and command line really weren’t designed to support this kind of use.  However, as a result of what we learned during the App Showdown, Didier Roche has begun planning a reboot of Quickly, which will improve both it’s command-line functionality, and it’s ability to be used as a callable library for apps like Quickly-Gtk.  If you are interested in the direction of Quickly’s development, I urge you to join in those planning meetings.

Launchpad Project: https://launchpad.net/quickly-gtk

Nothing breaks my heart quite like a request to make a project private–make it invisible to everyone except to the people the project trusts. I am utterly crushed when someone who works for Canonical or on Launchpad asks for one. I have been planning this feature for more than two years, and the Purple squad has been working on it for 13 months. I blog about this, I send emails about this, I present reports on this, but the people who most need private projects don’t know what the Purple squad is doing. I think the problem here is that Launchpad squads no longer use Launchpad to plan and execute work. There is no place for any interested party to see what the goals of Disclosure is and gauge how we are progressing.

I present my first draft of a report that states the simple goals of that the Disclosure feature wants to achieve . The report provides some summaries of the work that allows anyone to see what the Purple squad is doing, recently done, and will do next. There is also some analysis that provides insight into the amount of work remaining. This report complements the Purple squad’s kanban board. While kanban is excellent for tracking branches of code and technical tasks, the level of detail is unsuitable for non-Launchpad developers. The kanban board is also only accessible to a small number of people. I want a report that anyone interested in private projects or managing the disclosure of private information can see and understand. Mostly, I want everyone to see that the Purple squad is delivering valuable features and know when we will be done.

I based the report on the intended reporting UI for Launchpad series and milestones. I really miss using series and milestones to plan releases. For every milestone, I wrote our goals in the summary, and targeted bugs to the milestone. Though we abandoned the analytics because of performance concerns, I could reliably judge  the contributors’ velocity, and see when I needed to retarget work to another milestone because the remaining effort exceeded the milestone’s work capacity. Though I didn’t provide a burn down chart of the work, I could sort the milestone to see the colour change. I could confidently see and predict 3 months of work.

This report replaces the canvas-based chart I planned for series and milestones with a YUI 3 chart. The listing of bugs are split into categories so that I can focus on scheduling or provide Diogo with a list of bugs that need exploratory testing. Though this report thinks it is talking to Launchpad, it is actually using JSON for the 500+ bugs that I pulled using a trivial Launchpad API script. Since the data is cheap to retrieve, I can load the chart multiple times, each looking a different set of bug tags so that I can see specific themes of work.

The report shows that there is more than 60 days of work to complete the features needed by private projects. The Orange squad will work on private projects while the Purple squad finishes the prerequisites.

We want the project maintainer to be the default party that the project shares private information with. The problem at the moment is that Launchpad does not know how to set a team as the project maintainer during setup. Improper project setup is the root cause of most cases where information is disclosed to the wrong people. We need to improve project registration and setup to ensure users can ensure private information is managed properly. This issue is complicated by a very old issue, it is not possible to register a team at the moment you discover you need one. Launchpad must let me register a new team that will maintain my project when I first setup my project.

The Purple Squad discussed what we can do to simplify team registration and perform the registration in any page that allows you to set a team. We discovered several areas where we can make improvements.

• Do not ask for non-essential information like contact address.
• We can simplify the team membership policy language.
• We can fix the confusion about membership renewal.
• Launchpad can pre-fill the form with sensible defaults when the team will be used in a role.

Ian put together a demonstration to prove we could extend the person picker to also permit you to register a team.

When you want to set the project maintainer to a new team, Launchpad will ask you to confirm its suggestions for the Launchpad Id, display name, and membership policy. You can change the values, but most of the time you will choose to continue, and Launchpad will register the team and place it in the role.

As you’ve probably heard already, Ubuntu is running an App Developer Showdown competition where contestants have three weeks to build an Ubuntu app from scratch.  The rules are simple: It has to be new code, it has to run on Ubuntu, and it has to be submitted to the Software Center.  The more you use Ubuntu’s tools, the better your chances of winning will be.  This week we ran a series of workshops introducing these tools and how they can be used.  It all seemed like so much fun, that I’ve decided to participate with my own submission!

Now 2 our of the 6 judges for this competition are my immediate co-workers, so let me just start off by saying that I will not be eligible for any of the prizes.  But it’s still a fun and interesting challenge, so I’m going to participate anyway.  But what is my entry going to be?  Well in my typical fashion of building tools for tools, I’ve decided to write a GUI wrapper on to of Quickly, using Quickly.

Before I started on any code, I first wanted to brainstorm some ideas about the interface itself.  For that I went back to my favorite mockup tool: Pencil.  I knew I wanted to cover all of Quickly’s functions, both for creating projects and working on them afterwards.  I also wanted something that would keep track of my projects, so I wouldn’t have to find where they are on my disk whenever I wanted to hack on them.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of GUI builders.  Even back when I was writing Java/Swing apps, and GUI builders were all the rage, I never used them.  I didn’t use one for Hello Unity, and I wasn’t planning on using Glade for this project either.  But after Jono’s fantastic workshop session about Glade, I decided to give it another chance.  I found that I was able to get a basic UI built and running in very little time.  I’m still struggling with some, and there’s a point where you need to switch from Glade to code, but all in all it has saved me a significant amount of time.

Quickly also saved me a large amount of time, both in creating the project and adding things too it.  Being able to add an Application Indicator to your app by just running “quickly add indicator” is amazing.  From there is was a simple matter to build a menu based on available Quickly commands and tie them in with callback functions.

But the part I like the best about this app so far, is that it’s useful even when you’re not using it.  Most of the time you spend developing a Quickly app is going to be in some other application, such as your code editor of choice, Glade or something.  Thanks to Unity’s HUD, and the fact that it’s smart enough to check Indicator menus in addition to the focused application’s menus, you can call your Quickly commands any time, simply by tapping ‘Alt’ and the command you want to run.  It’s like having Quickly integrated into all of your other tools.

And thanks to the developer tools available in Ubuntu, I was able to accomplish all of this in only a few hours of work.

Now it’s very, very far from being complete.  For instance, the “active” project is hard-coded to my quickly-gtk working directory, it can’t start a project yet, or support commands that take optional arguments or user input.  But in a short amount of time I was able to go from a mockup to a working layout and even some functional code.  It even packages successfully, something I found out quite by accident when I selected “Share” from the indicator menu and ended up with a package in my PPA.

Building an app in 4 hours then accidentally building a proper package and uploading it to a PPA, who’d have thought we’d ever make it that easy?  I hope you all are having as much fun and success in your showdown applications as I am.

It’s no secret anymore, we want apps in Ubuntu.  Big app, small apps, shiny apps, cute apps,  apps that play a catchy tune while avian avengers explode porcine poachers.  You name it, we want it in Ubuntu.  And we need your help getting them.

It doesn’t matter if you’re not a programmer, there are plenty of programmers in the world, and they’re making all kinds of really cool apps that you want, that I want, that we all want.  But they’re not putting them in Ubuntu, and that’s why I need your help.

You see I’m just one person, and with David Planella we’ve got, well, two people.  Now, two people can find an awful lot of apps on the internet, that’s true.  Especially when that’s part of your job.  But even still that would hardly amount to a drop in the bucket of apps that have been made.  And we’re not happy with just a drop in the bucket, are you?

No, of course you’re not.  So right about now you’re probably thinking of a bunch of cool apps you’ve used or seen or read about recently (and if you weren’t before, you certainly are now, aren’t you).  And you may be wondering how you can help us get them into the Ubuntu Software Center.   Well wonder no more my friend, because we have a Trello board.

Not terribly impressive, I’ll admit, but it is terribly useful.  You see, David and I will be contacting each and every one of these app developers about submitting their apps to the Software Center, and moving the card from column to column as that conversation progresses.  And while we have a nice long “To Contact” list right now, it’s not going to stay that way without your help.

We’re opening up this board to anybody who wants to add new upstream apps for us to contact.  All you need to do is follow David’s instructions on this wiki page to get started.  It’s quick, mostly painless, and best of all you get to start telling us what to do (at least a little bit).

But wait! There’s more!  Didn’t I say we were just two people?  There’s no way we could contact all these upstreams on our own.  And hey, you’ve just signed up to join the Trello board (you did do that, right?), which means you can start contacting them too, and moving their cards, and make Ubuntu even better.  We’ve even created a reusable email template that you can use for that initial contact.

If you contact one of the app developers, make sure you move their card to the “Conversation Started” column, assign it to yourself, and add comments about who you contacted and any other relevant information.  This of course requires that you joined the board, which you definitely should do if you are going to be working on this.  And please note that is says “Started”, not “Finished”.  Once you contact the developer, keep that line of communication open and help them through the process of submitting their app.  If you get to a point where you can’t help them, let David or I know and we’ll be happy to pick it up.

With the Ubuntu TV port to Unity 3d currently underway, the project team is looking towards future feature development and they want the community’s input on what the product should do.  Specifically they are gathering a list of use cases that consumers might want in a Smart TV in five key areas:

• Local/networked media
• How should Ubuntu TV interface with media on the local device or local network?
• Online media
• How should Ubuntu TV find and play online media?
• Control from another device (smartphone, tablet etc.)
• How can you use your existing phone or table to interface with your TV?
• Broadcast (LiveTV, PVR)
• How should Ubuntu TV list, store and playback live TV?
• Applications
• What types of applications would be useful on a TV?

So here’s your chance to get involved and be heard, go to this wiki page and start adding your use cases to the list.

Expanding on my previous post calling for pkgme backend contributors, here’s a list of the backends we would like to see added, and who in the community you can contact for help in making them. If you can act as a mentor for one of these backends, please say so in the comments and I will add your name to the list.    For any questions about pkgme itself, and what options are available to backends, your best bet is to ask James Westby (james_w) in the #pkgme channel on freenode.

Qt/qmake

QMake is a Makefile-generator. It uses information that the application author puts into a project file to build the Makefile for a project. A qmake backend would need to either use qmake to extract the information requested by pkgme, or parse the same project file that qmake uses in order to provide that information.

Information about qmake: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qmake-manual.html

Help Contact: Angelo Compagnucci

Flash

Flash applications can be packaged for Ubuntu by wrapping them in a GTK window that contains a Webkit browser widget, and an index.html file for it to load that embeds the given flash file.

The Quickly Flash template currently does much the same thing. To do the same in pkgme, you will need to pass the necessary wrapper files to the extra_files request. extra_files should return a JSON object where the key is the file path relative to the root of the target application, and the value is the contents of that file.

Help Contacts: Michael Terry and Stuart Langridge

HTML5

A backend for an HTML5 application would also require wrapping the target application in a GTK window with embedded Webkit widget. Only instead of creating an index.html, you would just point the Webkit widget to the target application’s HTML files.

Help Contact: Didier Roche

Java

The Java backend would need to parse ant’s build.xml files to extract information about the target application or an already built jar file’s manifest.

Help Contact: James Page

pkgme is a small utility created by James Westby, its purpose is to create a Debian package for any unpackaged applications.  It’s currently used when applications are submitted through the Ubuntu Developer Portal as tarballs, inspecting the contents of the application to determine how to build a package from it.  In order to support many different types and configurations of application, James built pkgme to support any number of different backends.

Currently there is support for apps using Python and Distutils, apps compiled by cmake, and apps written in Vala.  But there are still many, many applications out there that aren’t covered by these backends, including Qt apps, HTML5 apps, Flash apps and more.  That’s where you, dear contributor, come in.

UPDATE: Here is a list of desired backends and mentors to help you with them.

But I don’t know how to create packages!

That’s okay, you don’t need to know how to make packages to create a pkgme backend.  It already knows how to make packages, what it doesn’t know is where to find the information it needs to do that.  This is what backends are, just one or more small scripts that extract enough information about a project to let pkgme do its thing.

Ok, I’m interested, how do I start?

First of all, get a copy of the latest pkgme code from its bazaar branch in Launchpad:

bzr branch lp:pkgme ./pkgme

Then, create a VirtualEnv environment to install it into:

virtualenv ./env

Then, install it into the Virtualenv:

source ./env/bin/activate
cd ./pkgme
python setup.py develop

Now you’ve got a working pkgme installed and running in your virtualenv. You can leave your virtualenv by running ‘deactivate’.  Time to get started on your backend!

Where do I put my new backend code?

Since we’re going to submit your new backend to the pkgme branch, we can just create it there:

cd ..
mkdir ./pkgme/pkgme/backends/<your backend name>

Great, now I have an empty Backend, what do I put here?

The first thing your backend needs is a ‘want’ file.  You see, in order for pkgme to know which backend it should use on any particular application, it needs to ask every backend how much they want it.  It does this by executing a script named ‘want’ in each backend.

Your want file is executed from the target application’s directory, so in your script ./ will be the root of the target application’s directory.  This lets you script easily browse through the files in the application to determine how well it can provide packaging information for it.

In order to tell pkgme how much your backend wants to handle the target application, your ‘want’ file simply needs to print a number to STDOUT.  The backend with the highest number is the one pkgme will use.  These are the suggested ranges for your ‘want’ value:

• 0 – no information can be provided about the project (e.g. a Ruby backend with a Python project).
• 10 – some information can be provided, but the backend is generic (e.g. Ruby backend).
• 20 – some information can be provided, and the backend is more generic than just language (e.g. Ruby on Rails backend).
• 30 – some information can be provided, and the backend is highly specialized.

Now I have what I want, what do I do with it?

Once pkgme has chosen your backend to use against an application, it will call one or more scripts from your backend to get information about the application.  As the backend author, you can choose to provide separate scripts for each piece of information, or you can provide just a single script called ‘all_info’ that will provide everything.

Lots of scripts

For separate scripts, you will need to provide an executable in your backend directory for each of the pieces of information that pkgme might request.  Each script should print that information to STDOUT, or exit with an error if it can not provide it.

Just one script

However, if looking up bits of information one at a time is a time-consuming task for your backend, you can do it all in one shot.  If you want to do that, then the only script you need is one called ‘all_info’.  When this script is called, it is also given a JSON list on STDIN.  This list contains the keys for all the pieces of information that pkgme needs from your backend.  As output, this scripts needs to print a JSON dictionary to STDOUT.  This dictionary should contain a key for each of the fields sent as input, along with its corresponding value.  If your backend can’t provide a value for one of those fields, it should be left out of the dictionary.

You can test your new backend by switching to the directory of a project your backend is made to support, and running:

pkgme

Make sure your virtualenv is still activated, or pkgme won’t be found. If everything works, you should have a ./debian/ directory in the application’s root folder.

Hurray, my backend works.  Do you want it?

Of course we want it!  What a silly question.  And it’s already in your local branch of pkgme too!  Well, it’s in the directory anyway, you still need to add it to the workingset:

cd ./pkgme/pkgme/backends/
bzr add <your backend name>

Then commit your changes and push them back to Launchpad:

bzr commit -m "Added backend for <your backend name>"
bzr push lp:~<your lp username>/pkgme/add-backend-<your backend name>

Then head on over to https://code.launchpad.net/pkgme, click on your new branch name, and then click the “propose for merging” link.  Fill out the description of what your backend adds, and submit it.  From there it will get reviewed by one of pkgme’s maintainers, and either get merged into the main branch, or sent back to you for fixes.

Sweet Chorus

Juju is revolutionizing the way web services are deployed in the cloud, taking what was either a labor-intensive manual task, or a very labor-intensive re-invention of the wheel  (or deployment automation in this case), and distilling it into a collection of reusable components called “Charms” that let anybody deploy multiple inter-connected services in the cloud with ease.

There are currently 84 Juju charms written for everything from game backends to WordPress sites, with databases and cache servers that work with them.  Charms are great when you can deploy the same service the same way, regardless of it’s intended use.  Wordpress is a good use case, since the process of deploying WordPress is going to be the same from one blog to the next.

Django’s Blues

But when you go a little lower in the stack, to web frameworks, it’s not quite so simple.  Take Django, for instance.  While much of the process of deploying a Django service will be the same, there is going to be a lot that is specific to the project.  A Django site can have any number of dependencies, both common additions like South and Celery, as well as many custom modules.  It might use MySQL, or PostgreSQL, or Oracle (even SQLite for development and testing).  Still more things will depend on the development process, while WordPress is available in a DEB package, or a tarball from the upstream site, a Django project may be anywhere, and most frequently in a source control branch specific to that project.  All of this makes writing a single Django charm nearly impossible.

There have been some attempts at making a generic, reusable Django charm.  Michael Nelson made one that uses Puppet and a custom config.yaml for each project.  While this works, it has two drawbacks: 1) It requires Puppet, which isn’t natural for a Python project, and 2) It required so many options in the config.yaml that you still had to do a lot by hand to make it work.  The first of these was done because ISD (where Michael was at the time) was using Puppet to deploy and configure their Django services, and could easily have been done another way.  The second, however, is the necessary consequence of trying to make a reusable Django charm.

Just for Fun

Given the problems detailed above, and not liking the idea of making config options for every possible variation of a Django project, I recently took a different approach.  Instead of making one Django Charm to rule them all, I wrote a small Django App that would generate a customized Charm for any given project.  My goal is to gather enough information from the project and it’s environment to produce a charm that is very nearly complete for that project.  I named this charming code “Naguine” after Django Reinhardt’s second wife, Sophie “Naguine” Ziegler.  It seemed fitting, since this project would be charming Django webapps.

Naguine is very much a JFDI project, so it’s not highly architected or even internally consistent at this point, but with a little bit of hacking I was able to get a significant return. For starters, using Naguine is about as simple as can be, you simply install it on your PYTHONPATH and run:

python manage.py charm --settings naguine

The –settings naguine will inject the naguine django app into your INSTALLED_APPS, which makes the charm command available.

This Kind of Friend

The charm command makes use of your Django settings to learn about your other INSTALLED_APPS as well as your database settings.  It will also look for a requirements.txt and setup.py, inspecting each to learn more about your project’s dependencies.  From there it will try to locate system packages that will provide those dependencies and add them to the install hook in the Juju  charm.

The charm command also looks to see if your project is currently in a bzr branch, and if it is it will use the remote branch to pull down your  project’s code during the install.  In  the future I hope to also support git and hg deployments.

Finally the command will write hooks for linking to a database instance on another server, including running syncdb to create the tables for your models, adding a superuser account with a randomly generated password and, if you are using South, running any migration scripts as well. It also writes some metadata about your charm and a short README explaining how to use it.

All that is left for you to do is review the generated charm, manually add any dependencies Naguine couldn’t find a matching package for, and manually add any install or database initialization that is specific to your project.  The amount of custom work needed to get a charm working is extremely minor, even for moderately complex projects.

Are you in the Mood

To try Naguine with your Django project, use the following steps:

1. cd to your django project root (where your manage.py is)
2. bzr branch lp:naguine
3. python manage.py charm –settings naguine

That’s all you need.  If your django project lives in a bzr branch, and if it normally uses settings.py, you should have a directory called ./charms/precise/ that contains an almost working Juju charm for your project.

I’ve only tested this on a few Django project, all of which followed the same general conventions when it came to development, so don’t be surprised if you run into problems.  This is still a very early-stage project after all.  But you already have the code (if you followed step #2 above), so you can poke around and try to get it working or working better for your project.  Then submit your changes back to me on Launchpad, and I’ll merge them in.  You can also find me on IRC (mhall119 on freenode) if you get stuck and I will help you get it working.

(For those who are interested, each of the headers in this post is the name of a Django Reinhardt song)

Setting up a commercial project in Launchpad has gotten easier. You can now quickly register a proprietary project and enable private bugs. You can create private teams and private personal package archives, AKA private PPA or P3A without the assistance of a Launchpad admin.

When you select the Other/Proprietary license while registering a project, or changing the project’s details,

it is given a complimentary 30-day commercial subscription.

The delay between the moment when a commercial project was registered and when the commercial subscription was purchased and then applied to the project caused a lot of confusion. During this delay, proprietary data could be disclosed. We chose to award the project with a short term commercial subscription which enabled the project to be properly configured while the 12-month commercial subscription was being purchased and applied to the project.

Any project with a commercial subscription can enable

Default private bugs

Once enabled by configuring the project’s bug tracker, all new reported bugs are private. You can choose to make the report public.

Default private branches

You can request a Launchpad admin to configure private branches for your teams. (You will be able to do this yourself in the near future when projects gain proprietary branches.)

As the maintainer of a project with a commercial subscription, you can register

Private teams

When you register a team, you can choose to set the team visibility to private. The team’s members and data is hidden from non-members.

Private mailing lists

When you create a mailing list for a private team, the archive is also private. Only team members may see the messages in the archive.

Private PPAs

When you create a PPA for your public team, you may choose to make it private; private teams can only have private PPAs. You can subscribe users to your archive so that they may install packages without revealing all your team’s members and data to the subscriber.

A secondary benefit of this change is that you can now try Launchpad’s commercial features before purchasing a 12-month commercial subscription. The features will be disabled at the end of 30-days. Your test data will remain private to ensure your data is not disclosed.

Any open source project may also have a commercial subscription to enable commercial features. You can purchase a commercial subscription at the Canonical store. Commercial subscriptions cost US$250/year/project + applicable V.A.T.

(Photo by Fred Dawson on flickr, creative commons license)

Launchpad can now show you all the people that your project is sharing private bugs and branches with. This new sharing feature is a few weeks away from being in beta, but the UI is informative, so we’re enabling this feature for members of the Launchpad Beta Testers team now. If you’d like to join, click on the ‘join’ link on the team page.

What you’ll see

Project maintainers and drivers can see all the users that are subscribed to private bugs and branches. The listing might be surprising, maybe even daunting. You may see people who no longer contribute to the project, or people you do not know at all. The listing of users and teams illustrates why we are creating a new way of sharing project information without managing bug and branch subscriptions.

If you’re a member of (or once you’re a member of, if we want people to join) the Launchpad Beta Testers team, you can find the Sharing link on the front page of your project. I cannot see who your project is sharing with, nor can you see who my projects are sharing with, but I will use the Launchpad project as an example to explain what the Launchpad team is seeing.

The Launchpad project

The Launchpad project is sharing private bugs and branches with 250 users and teams. This is the first time Launchpad has ever provided this information. It was impossible to audit a project to ensure confidential information is not disclosed to untrusted parties. I still do not know how many private bugs and branches the Launchpad project has, nor do I even know how many of these are shared with me. Maybe Launchpad will provide this information in the future.

Former developers still have access

I see about 30 former Launchpad and Canonical developers still have access to private bugs and branches. I do not think we should be sharing this information with them. I’m pretty sure they do not want to notified about these bugs and branches either. I suspect Launchpad is wasting bandwidth by sending emails to dead addresses.

Unknown users

I see about 100 users that I do not know. I believe they reported bugs that were marked private. Some may have been subscribed by users who were already subscribed to the bug. I can investigate the users and see the specific bug and branches that are shared with them.

The majority

The majority of users and teams that the Launchpad project is sharing with are members of either the Launchpad team or the Canonical team. I am not interested in investigating these people. I do not want to be managing their individual bug and branch subscriptions to ensure they have access to the information that they need to do their jobs. Soon I won’t have to think about this issue, nor will I see them listed on this page.

Next steps — sharing ‘All information’

In a few weeks I will share the Launchpad project’s private information with both the Launchpad team and the Canonical team. It takes seconds to do, and about 130 rows of listed users will be replaced with just two rows stating that ‘All information’ is shared with the Launchpad and Canonical teams. I will then stop sharing private information with all the former Launchpad and Canonical employees.

Looking into access via bug and branch subscriptions

Then I will investigate the users who have exceptional access via bug and branch subscriptions. I may stop sharing information with half of them because either they do not need to know about it, or the information should be public.

Bugs and private bugs

I could start investigating which bugs are shared with users now, but I happen to know that there are 29 bugs that the Launchpad team cannot see because they are not subscribed to the private bug. There are hundreds of private bugs in Launchpad that cannot be fixed because the people who can fix them were never subscribed. This will be moot once all private information in the Launchpad project is shared with the Launchpad team.

Unsubscribing users from bugs

Launchpad does not currently let me unsubscribe users from bugs. When project maintainers discover confidential information is disclosed to untrusted users, they ask the Launchpad Admins to unsubscribe the user. There are not enough hours in the day to for the Admins to do this. Just as Launchpad will let me share all information with a team or user, I will also be able to stop sharing.

(Image by loop_oh on flickr, creative commons license)

Hello Unity is now open for translations!

Please help me make this technology showcase is available to application developers in your native language.  Translations are done through Launchpad, and will be built into the Hello Unity package.

I spent some more time over the weekend working on Hello Unity.  If you haven’t already, be sure to read my first post about it.  In short, Hello Unity is a showcase application that demonstrates all the different ways an application developer can integrate their app with the Unity desktop.

The current version of Hello Unity sports a new syntax-highlighted code display, which makes it much easier to read and understand what the code is doing.  I also spent a significant amount of time going through and heavily commenting the code to explain what everything was doing.

In the Launcher section I added support for setting the “urgent” status of the application.  In Unity, this will cause the application’s icon in the Launcher to shake and, if the Launcher is set to auto-hide, will also cause the icon to slide out into view while it shakes.  This is a very useful way of telling a user that your application needs their attention.

A new section was added for integrating with the Message Menu.  It automatically adds a Hello Unity section to the menu, and allows you to add count indicators to it.  Clicking on an item in the menu will execute the code for removing it.  All of this is explicitly commented on in the source code.

Another new section is for Notifications.  While it uses the generic libnotify API, it does highlight how to use it with Ubuntu’s Notify-OSD display system, including how to updated and append text to the currently displayed notification.

Once again, if you are interested in contributing to this project, you can get the code from the Launchpad project page.  Also available there are source tarballs and installable .DEB files.

There have been some recent accusation that the Ubuntu community isn’t taking criticism well.  However, those making the accusations seem to have a misunderstanding about what exactly criticism is.  In an effort to improve the quality of that feedback, I’ve put together a short, simple list of things you can check to make sure your criticism is in fact criticism.

1) “It sucks” is not criticism

It’s an insult.  It means “I have no respect for you, your time, or your talents”.  Don’t be surprised when the recipient of this message is not inclined to help you, or even listen to you, afterwards.

2) “I don’t like it” is not criticism

It’s complaining.  In order to elevate complaining to criticism, you need to explain why it is bad in a way that gives enough information for it to be improved.  If you are not capable of explaining why it is bad, then you don’t fully understand why you don’t like it.  And if you don’t understand why you don’t like it, what hope do we have of knowing how to fix it?

3) “It’s not perfect” is not criticism

We know it’s not perfect.  It’s not perfect because we are not perfect.  Another consequence of our being mortal is the fact that we don’t necessarily know where it’s not perfect, so please go back and read #2 again.

4) “Make it more like X” is not criticism

If what you  really want is X, then use X.  If you  think X is doing something better, then explain what it is and why it is better in a way that is more than just “It is better because X has it, and X is better”.  Again go back and re-read #2.

5) “Turn it into something different” is not criticism

Just because something isn’t what you want, doesn’t mean it’s not what it is supposed to be.  Don’t ask for changes to the fundamental nature of something. If something is fundamentally different from what you want, look for something else.

If your feedback doesn’t fall into one of these five areas, then there’s a very good chance that it will be welcomed and worked on by the Ubuntu community.  If it does, then I would seriously recommend going back and re-thinking your position.

One of the most requesting things since I first introduced Singlet was to have a Quickly template for creating Unity Lenses with it.  After weeks of waiting, and after upgrading Singlet to work in Precise, and getting it into the Universe repository for 12.04, I finally set to work on learning enough Quickly internals to write a template.

It’s not finished yet, and I won’t guarantee that all of Quickly’s functions work, but after a few hours of hacking I at least have a pretty good start.  It’s not packaged yet, so to try it out you will need todo the following:

1. bzr branch lp:~mhall119/singlet/quickly-lens-template
2. sudo ln -s ./quickly-lens-template /usr/share/quickly/templates/singlet-lens
3. quickly create singlet-lens <your-lens-project-name>
4. cd <your-lens-project-name>
5. quickly package

The title may sound like a contradiction, but I assure you that it is not. You can now use private teams in social contexts in Launchpad. Private teams can collaborate with public projects and other teams if they choose to reveal the existence of the private team.

1. Private teams can me members of other teams.
2. Other teams can be members of private teams.
3. Private teams can subscribe to bugs, blueprints, branches, and merge proposals
4. Private teams  can be in public project roles,  such as maintainers, drivers, and bug supervisors.
5. You can change the branch owner to be a private team.
6. Private team personal branches (+junk) are always private.

When a member places the private team in a social situation, a the member is asked to confirm that it is okay to reveal the team’s identifying information. This information is the team’s Launchpad Id used in URLs, the displayname, icon, and logo. A user can visit the private team’s Launchpad page and will only see that information. The rest of the page is not shared. Anonymous users cannot see a private team’s page because that user is not being social; logged in users can see the private team’s page

Private team page seen by a non-member

Launchpad did not permit these interactions previously because it was not clear who should know about the team. Someone has to know. If Launchpad permitted private teams to subscribe to bugs or be members of teams without anyone knowing of them, they would be unaccountable. Private teams could spy on organisation, or learn about security vulnerabilities to exploit. Launchpad will not ever permit such asocial behaviour. The resolution for social interactions was to permit other parties to know enough of the private team to make an informed decision. For example, when I choose to make a bug private, I want to know who was already seen the bug through a subscription. I may choose to unsubscribe the private team if I do not trust them.

Private teams may invite exclusive teams to be members. Exclusive teams (moderated or restricted teams) review all members so they are accountable. If a team admin trusts the admins of another team, and that team is accountable, Launchpad permits the other team to be a member. This is actually a rule that applied to all exclusive teams. private teams are always exclusive (restricted membership policy). The only nuance with private teams is when it is a member of another team; the super team may know the members of the private sub team because the super team has the right to audit all its members so that it too can be accountable.

Launchpad will soon permit you to say your project is not affected by a bug shared with another project — you can delete the spurious bug task. This action can be done from the bug’s web page, and using Launchpad API.

You can remove a project from a bug if you are the project maintainer, bug supervisor, or are the person who added the project to the bug. This action can only be performed when the bug affects more than one project — you cannot delete an entire bug. This feature permits you to undo mistakes.

Launchpad beta testers will see the remove action next to the affected project name in the affects table.

The delete() method was added to the bug_task entry in the Launchpad API. There is a example API script, delete_bugtasks.py, that can remove a project from many bugs. There is also a split action to create a separate bug just for the specified project to track separate conversations in bug comments.

Usage: delete_bugtasks.py [options] bug_id:project_name [bug_id:project_name]

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose
  -q, --quiet
  -f, --force           Delete or split bug tasks that belong to a public bug
  -d, --delete          Delete a spurious project bug task from a bug
  -s, --split           Split a project bug task from an existing bug so that
                        the issue can be tracked separately
  -w WEBSITE, --website=WEBSITE
                        The URI of Launchpad web site.
                        Default: https://api.launchpad.net;
                        Alternates: https://api.staging.launchpad.net,

https://api.qastating.launchpad.net

Previously, you could not remove spurious bug reports about your project. Many were cause by poor bug target management; you could not move a bug between projects and distributions. You can now move bugs between projects and distributions, but thousands of bugs still wrongly claim to affect a project or distribution. This causes clutter on bug pages and searches, and it causes Launchpad performance problems.

This change is a part of a super-feature called Disclosure. To ensure that confidential data is not accidentally disclosed, Launchpad will only permit private bugs to affect a single project. Soon, you may need to remove a project from a bug before marking the bug private.

Nikki and the Robots is the first game from Berlin based games studio Joyride Labs. It’s a retro-styled platformer with beautiful colours and an open source licence, with bugs tracked in Launchpad.

I asked Iwan & Sönke from Joyride Labs about the game.

Matthew: Nikki and the Robots is LGPL and Creative Commons licensed. What made you choose open source licences?

Iwan & Sönke: This one is easy! Our love of open source software and free art made us do it! Also we expect that being open will get us additional attention and love.

Our work and how we license it is an experiment too, so actually we ‘hope’ rather than expect.

Matthew: How are you planning to distribute the game once it’s ready?

Iwan & Sönke: We are working on the first part of Nikki and the Robots and will start in-dev-sales (pre-sale) once it is ready.

Game, editor and user levels will be free as in freedom. A part-proprietary organic story mode with enhanced levels and additional in-game-art will be available for pay.

Matthew: Can you tell me a bit more about the technology behind the game and the decisions you made? I see, for example, you’re using Haskell.

Iwan & Sönke: Haskell is just my (Sönke’s) favourite language. I have the impression that I can do coding in Haskell much faster than in other languages and I produce less bugs. Besides Haskell we use Qt and OpenGL as the graphics backend and Chipmunk as the physics engine. By the way: we completely rely on free software for compilation on all platforms (so, no VisualStudio or XCode, just gcc, cmake, mingw32, etc.).

Matthew: How are you finding Launchpad as a bug tracker?

Iwan & Sönke: It’s quite usable. Forum and wiki might be useful features to consider for the platform. (We use a free wiki system and will probably set up an own forum soon).

Matthew: Thanks to Iwan and Sönke. You can download an alpha of Nikki and the Robots from the Joyride Labs website.

There’s quite a bit of overlap between home beer brewing and hacking. Both usually involve experimentation, sharing and a love of what you’re doing.

It’s not surprising, then, that there’s more than one open source project aimed at helping home brewers to create the beer they want. A few home brewing projects are hosted on Launchpad, including JolieBulle (that’s French for “pretty bubble”).

Pierre Tavares started the project last year to support his own brewing. The result is an application that helps at every stage of the process. When you’re ready to get going, it helps formulate the recipe and allows for the sharing of recipes using the common BeerXML standard. It helps calculate what brewers call the beer’s profile (its bitterness, colour, how much alcohol it has), includes an ingredients database and has tools that help during the brewing process itself.

I emailed Pierre to ask about the development of JolieBulle. Here’s what he said:

From a technical point of view, JolieBulle is developped in pyQt and integrates well in both KDE and Gnome desktops.

I chose Launchpad mainly for the openness of the platform, and the great tools to manage code, bugs and blueprints. I’m pretty new to DVCSes but Bazaar seems fine, and I have no problem using it. I don’t use the translation tool, as I prefer Qt Linguist.

JolieBulle isn’t yet packaged for any distros and Pierre hopes to attract contributors who can help with that.

Photo by Sizbut. Licence CC BY 2.0.

Luz is a new project to Launchpad. It creates impressive visual effects that can react to music or be driven by a person using a MIDI controller or a gamepad.

It has been created by Ian McIntosh, part of a Portland, Oregon, artists collective who produce light and projection shows.

Here’s what the Luz page on the Light Troupe site has to say:

With one click, any movement or effect can dance to the beat, react to audio, or be driven directly by human input from any number of any device: Gamepads & Joysticks, MIDI knobs & sliders, MIDI Pianos & Drums, WiiMotes, Wacom Tablets, and any app that can send OpenSoundControl.

Ian has provided a handy series of YouTube tutorials, to get you started. If you want to try it out, here’s the first of those tutorials: