Launchpad still requires Python 2, which in 2020 is a bit of a problem. Unlike a lot of the rest of 2020, though, there’s good reason to be optimistic about progress.
I’ve been porting Python 2 code to Python 3 on and off for a long time, from …
We released Storm 0.21 on Friday (the release announcement seems to be stuck in moderation, but you can look at the NEWS file directly). For me, the biggest part of this release was adding Python 3 support.
Storm is a really nice and lightweight ORM (object-relational mapper) for Python …
I’ve released man-db 2.8.7 (announcement, NEWS), and uploaded it to Debian unstable.
There are a few things of note that I wanted to talk about here. Firstly, I made some further improvements to the seccomp sandbox originally introduced in 2.8.0. I do still think it …
I upgraded my home server from Debian stretch to buster recently, which is something I normally do once we’re frozen: this is a system that was first installed in 1999 and has a lot of complicated stuff on it, and while I try to keep it as cleanly-maintained as …
I’ve released binfmt-support 2.2.0. These are the major changes since 2.1.8:
Sometimes I want to deploy Swift, the OpenStack object storage system.
Well, no, that’s not true. I basically never actually want to deploy Swift as such. What I generally want to do is to debug some bit of production service deployment machinery that relies on Swift for getting build …
Weird test failures are great at teaching you things that you didn’t realise you might need to know.
As previously mentioned, I’ve been working on converting Launchpad from Buildout to virtualenv and pip, and I finally landed that change on our development branch today. The final landing was …
I’ve been using Kitten Block for years, since I don’t really need the blood pressure spike caused by accidentally following links to certain UK newspapers. Unfortunately it hasn’t been ported to Firefox 57. I tried emailing the author a couple of months ago, but my email bounced …
I fixed a bug in Launchpad recently that led me deeper than I expected.
Launchpad uses Buildout as its build system for Python packages, and it’s served us well for many years. However, we’re using 1.7.1, which doesn’t support ensuring that packages required using setuptools …
I was recently asked to sort things out so that snap builds on Launchpad could themselves install snaps as build-dependencies. To make this work we need to start doing builds in LXD containers rather than in chroots. As a result I’ve been doing some quite extensive refactoring of launchpad-buildd …