Launchpadding, bzr --verify-signatures, Desktop Summit

Bazaar developers like to play against the odds, whatever the odds

This week I'm in Dublin for Canonical's mid-cycle meetup where our Ubuntu developers work on their normal projects but with the advantage of face to face contact with colleagues. It's a bit like working from an office but without the commute and with more Guiness.

Except I'm on rotation to the Bazaar team who this week are working alongside the lovely Launchpad team. Launchpad is Canonical's free software project hosting site, with a focus on inter-project collaboration and code hosting with the world's nicest revision control system Bazaar. It's also Free software openly developed (unlike Github, Google Code, Sourceforge etc).

So to broaden my programming horizons I've been fixing bugs in Launchpad. Setting up a local instance of Launchpad involves lots of faff with databases and web servers but fortunately it's all scripted and I could get it up in 3 hours (which impressed the Launchpad devs who are more used to it taking a day, the power of cloud computing there). Although it's all Python, getting into the code is not trivial, the Zope templates are easy enough but working out the layers from database through model classes into view classes via interfaces and security proxies can be daunting. But it turns out entirely doable, bugs can be fixed and documentation improved and test cases written. All code gets peer reviewed (using Launchpad of course) before being merged then sent off to a cloud server which runs the complete code test suite (which takes about 4 hours, painful but a good sign that all the code really is tested). Once merged it appears on the qastaging server where it gets QA checked (again) and only then is it ready for deployment, safe in the knowledge that bugs have been fixed rather than added.

Your friendly Launchpad team

Meanwhile in bzr land I added a new command bzr --verify-signatures to check the GPG signatures on commits. This is needed for Ubuntu Distributed Development, the grand project to turn all Ubuntu packages into Bazaar branches. I also added a GUI for QBzr.

And I'm all booked up to visit Berlin next month for some top talks on the Free software desktop.