When code is imported all contributors are not coupled to registered accounts by default, you need to manually claim a contributor’s role. Our beloved bot Launchpad Code Hosting frequently appeared in the list of contributors, but always remained unclaimed. I thought it would be interesting to collect all work the poor bot has been doing day in day out, night in night out.

I registered an account under the name ‘Launchpad Code Hosting‘ and claimed all contributors with the same name. Ohloh hasn’t updated the overview yet, but in time we will be able to see how much experience the bot has and how many that’s worth in dollars.

You can find the account at https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/launchpad.

It seems that Ohloh stops checking Bazaar branches after a while and that the import then keeps failing. It could be that the statistics are affected by this.

Since desktops aren’t that easy to take with you in your luggage, I won’t be reachable during those two weeks, apart for the lucky few that happen to know my cellphone number.

While planning this post I suddenly realized that maybe this post doesn’t have that much use. I’m not as much a part of the community anymore like I used to be. Not that I played a very important role or did a lot, but I did more for Ubuntu that I do now. Most of my contributions consist of bug reporting and an occasional suggestion or patch.

However, I would like to do more for Ubuntu. Maybe I should start working on Ubuntu Wanted again. When I’m back I’ll reconsider the project. Current options are: completely abandon the project, continue work on the current code and my favourite: examine the posibility of extending Launchpad to do what Ubuntu Wanted was ought to do.

Some of the changes to Launchpad could be:

• Extend profiles to include personal skills, both given by the user and measured on an Ohloh kind of way
• Extend team applying for moderated teams, e.g. to require certain skills, provide details about the application procedure and more
• Allow teams and people to create tasks and to assign them to projects, like the way branches already work

There is obviously much more that can be done , e.g. I didn’t include the mentoring system for example, but I will have a closer look on the possibilities and problems when I return. Meanwhile, if you have suggestions, please leave a comment. However, please refrain from spamming since I won’t be there to check if Askiment fails to filter everything.

The PPA is located at https://launchpad.net/~qense/+archive/quickly

Unfortunately I made a mistake with the version, I’ve just added ~ppa1 at the end, but I want to add the Bazaar revision as well in newer versions, something I forgot here. Any thoughts on the possibilites of adding ~bzr{rev-nr.} somewhere?

I’ll manually try to update the package and the end of every day(CEST), provided there’s a new revision.

What is Quickly? According to the ‘Quickly Help Index’ it’s ‘a set of choices about writing apps for Ubuntu.’ Basically, it’s an application that creates a stub of a program for you based on a template. At the moment there’s only one template, which creates an Ubuntu project in Python.

If you’ve created a nice template that isn’t included in the branches yet you can always mail me with a request to add it to the PPA. But I’d recommend you to first try to submit it to Quickly.

(By the way, I’m not involved in the Quickly project, I just sent the source files to my PPA.)

At the moment(revision 4) the module works and can be used as a full replacement for the D5 version. You don’t need to have an adapted version of the OpenID module, that is only needed if you want to use Launchpad as the single sign-on provider.

The module won’t be specifically modified for Ubuntu Wanted, because the hooks it provides to request team information are already enough.They can provide us with enough information to ensure that the person that places the task actually is a member of the team he’s placing it for.

If we want more information about the teams, e.g. contact information, we’ll need something else. However, that won’t happen soon, especially since I’m not aware of a Drupal module that implements the Launchpad API, but also because it isn’t an essential feature. If you do happen to know such a module, please tell us.

Other things that made me stop were rumours about a Drupal 5 module and a lack of time. I did want to share the small stub I had, though. I uploaded the single file to lp:~qense/+junk/liblp-php. Don’t expect much of it though. All it currently should be able to do is to authenticate itself using OAuth. I just tested it a tiny bit, so there could be a lot of bugs.

I’ll explain how you can authenticate yourself. It’s possible that I’ve made some bad design decissions, but please remember this isn’t even pre-alpha. I didn’t safe OAuth keys, so reusing authentication could be problematic.

You start with calling the contructor by creating a new class. You need at least to pass on two things: the key you want to use, which is used to identify your site and generate the OAuth key and if you’ve got a token from earlier sessions you should pass it as the second argument. A username can be passed as the third argument, although the only thing the class currently does with it, is saving it.

After that you need to call the method auth(), which checks if the user already has given permission to the page to use Launchpad on his/her behalf. If (s)he hasn’t the URL the user needs to surf to is returned, if the user already was authenticated it returns true and when you get the tokens for the first time the tokens are returned. That is probably a very bad practise, but I wanted to get something working quicly so I could test it.

That’s currently all it can do, although I did write two functions which can do GET and POST requests usin cURL. The idea is to let bugs, people and other things be represented by classes, which members can used to manipulate the data. When you do echo classname_of_e.g._bug you should get the link to its page.

Well, that’s just the idea. I’m not sure if it will ever be finished. If anyone is interested in continuing with this I’d be glad to help if (s)he needs me. People don’t have to use it, I just though that I should share it, so people who could be interested would be able to find it.

Feedback is welcome, as always. However, please keep in mind that this code is written in one afternoon and didn’t got any reviews afterwards. This means it can be dangerous to use. ONLY use it on staging.

After I read an maillist entry from dholbach and the blog post it was pointing to(The Harvest Season has begun!) I thought again of an idea I already wanted to add to Brainstorm before, but never did. The idea was to integrate the program ohcount used at Ohloh to analyse projects.

Keeping your project in good shape is vital for the results. But in order to do that, you have to be able to keep track of the shape. Currently Launchpad doesn’t provide a tool to do so. The Ubuntu QA team uses several homebrew tools to do so, but it would be beter if this would be integrated within Launchpad and be available to projects outside Ubuntu. When Harvest would be added next to ohloh, keeping track of bugs and patches would be made a lot easier, so submitted patches won’t lie around for decades before someone has a look at them.

The functionality of both projects could help project managers and contributors a lot when they need information and I think that the quality of code could really improve.

“Oh really? How speciall…”

It’s indeed a bit more special than a not working device. I suggested to move to Launchpad. Why? Because I think Launchpad is much better than Bugzilla. One of the main reasons is Launchpads(or actually Malones) Bug Watches. A project like freedesktop.org is used in almost every Linux distro and beyond. There are a lot of different bug reports in a lot of different bug trackers filed against packages maintained by this wonderful(yes, it’s an amazing project). Launchpad is capable of keeping track of all those reports. And I’ve always found that Bugzilla isn’t a very good set out bug tracker. It’s just not very clear and you press very easily the wrong button. Anyway, I’ve explained myself detailed enough in the bug report.

One thing I did find that Launchpad misses is the option to add different programs and versions to the bug tracker, something Bugzilla does have. So I submitted an idea to Brainstorm:
. Please vote for it.

And yes, maybe I am lazy. I just find it much easier if I can just add a freedesktop task to a bugreport instead of filing it upstream. But I also think that Freedesktop and its users can profite a lot from moving to Launchpad. So I really hope they’ll do it.

(Forgive the use of the ‘ubuntu’ tag. I know it doesn’t have much to do with Ubuntu, but I just wanted to reach the readers of Planet Ubuntu Users. It can have a lot of positive effects on Ubuntu, so it will surely affect it.)

For my OpenID account, provided by Launchpad, I’ve added this code between <head></head> in /wp-content/themes/qense/header.php:

<link rel="openid.server" href="https://login.launchpad.net/" />

<link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+id/xxxxxxxx" />

<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="https://login.launchpad.net/+id/xxxxxxx/+xrds" />

This code comes from the Launchpad help page for OpenID. Of course, I replaced xxxxxxxx with my OpenID id. Now I can enter http://www.qense.nl/ when logging in with OpenID.
Now I just have to find a way to couple my WordPress account to my OpenID!

EDIT: I’ve just found out how to add OpenID accounts to your WordPress account. Just go to your profile and add your OpenID URL to Your Identity URLs. You have to login with that account to confirm it and you can login with that ID too.

The one part that Canonical did release was Storm, an Object-Relational Mapper. The definition Wikipedia gives is:

“Object-Relational Mapping (aka ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in relational databases and object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a “virtual object database” which can be used from within the programming language. There are both free and commercial packages available that perform object-relational mapping, although some programmers opt to create their own ORM tools.”

It is, in plain English, a way to make lineair stuff from the database object oriented, and make an easy way to display the relations between it. Launchpad uses it for example for teams and their members.

I’ve been looking at Python as a web programming language a lot lately and I even think of making CAWS Python, with Storm as a part of it. But I don’t know what the other two would think of that. But it sure looks promissing and I think it can be a great language.

The only problem is that I couldn’t make mod_python to work in Apache. DotPy files are still offered to be downloaded when I try to access them at my local server(read my own computer). When I’ve found a sollution I’ll post it at this blog, since I couldn’t find anything that worked. I’ll also post some code when I’ve written something with Storm. But first I want to finish the website of Project Paragon and a part of the school website.

The website of Storm can be found here: FrontPage – Storm.
It contains a not that clear, but interesting Tutorial.

Something that people would immeadiatly say is that it is extremely dangerous. That’s true, very true. There would be a lot of people wanting to abuse this. Therefore such a system would need extreme seccurity. If something goes wrong the image of open-source would get a large blow.
I suggest to create a special support team that is assigned to this feature. That team needs to have a triple signed GPG key in it’s LP profile and it’s membership need to be confirmed by the owner. Having signed to Code of Conduct in such a way that it would be legally valid would also something that I’d recommend. And at registration an EULA that says that Launchpad isn’t responsible for anything that goes wrong and makes the abbusing person chargable. The tool should determine the rights of the person on the package where the problem was reported in and should just get access to that package, related programs and a terminal. If sudo should be enabled needs some serious discussion.

Adding this to Launchpad would bring the support of Ubuntu to a higher level, and make it a lot easier for people to be helped.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts about this.

Sources:

Using Launchpad accounts to manage your local ssh logins

I also just remembered that this blog still needs a redesign, I completely forgot. Well, I’ll do it, once…