As of 2022-02-16, Launchpad supports a couple of features on its SSH
endpoints (git.launchpad.net, bazaar.launchpad.net, ppa.launchpad.net,
and upload.ubuntu.com) that it previously didn’t: Ed25519 public
keys (a well-regarded format,
supported by OpenSSH since 6.5 in 2014) and signatures with existing RSA …
After a very long porting journey, Launchpad is finally running on Python 3 across all of our systems.
I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect on why my emotional responses to this port differ so much from those of some others who’ve done large ports, such …
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 …
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 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 …
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 …