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 …
I’ve had a kludgy mess of electronic address books for most of two decades, and have got rather fed up with it. My stack consisted of:
~/.mutt/aliases, a flat text file consisting of mutt alias commands~/.mutt/aliases, Debian’s LDAP database, and Canonical …Today I released man-db 2.7.6 (announcement, NEWS, git log), and uploaded it to Debian unstable. The major change in this release was a set of fixes for two security vulnerabilities, one of which affected all man-db installations since 2.3.12 (or 2.3.10-66 in Debian), and …
The Debian repository format was designed a long time ago. The oldest
versions of it were produced with the help of tools such as
dpkg-scanpackages and consumed by dselect access methods such as
dpkg-ftp. The access methods just fetched a Packages file (perhaps
compressed) and used it as an index …
Julian has written about their efforts to strengthen security in APT, and shortly before that notified us that Launchpad’s signatures on PPAs use weak SHA-1 digests. Unfortunately we hadn’t noticed that before; GnuPG’s defaults tend to result in weak digests unless carefully tweaked, which is a …
Launchpad operates a few SSH endpoints: bazaar.launchpad.net and
git.launchpad.net for code hosting, and upload.ubuntu.com and
ppa.launchpad.net for uploading packages. None of these are
straightforward OpenSSH servers, because they don’t give ordinary shell
access and they authenticate against users’ SSH keys recorded …
The Ubuntu Code of Conduct says:
Step down considerately: When somebody leaves or disengages from the project, we ask that they do so in a way that minimises disruption to the project. They should tell people they are leaving and take the proper steps to ensure that others can pick …
We had some requests to get GHC (the Glasgow Haskell Compiler) up and running on two new Ubuntu architectures: arm64, added in 13.10, and ppc64el, added in 14.04. This has been something of a saga, and has involved rather more late-night hacking than is probably good for me …
This is mostly a repost of my ubuntu-devel mail for a wider audience, but see below for some additions.
I’d like to upgrade to GRUB 2.02 for Ubuntu 14.04; it’s currently in beta. This represents a year and a half of upstream development, and contains many …