List o’ fresh dailies …

code.launchpad.net/+daily-builds

Have a good time!

Some progress on Daily Builds

We’ve been working with the Launchpad team to give upstream projects the ability to spin up daily builds.

It’s pretty straightforward to make a recipe, the one I use for shotwell is: 

# bzr-builder format 0.2 deb-version 1.0+{time}
lp:shotwell
nest shotwellpackaging lp:~ubuntu-desktop/shotwell/ubuntu debian

I was on holiday for a bit, so I clicked on this expecting it not to work, since it didn’t when I left. Then launchpad went ahead and did it.

NICE! What I’ve done here is basically grabbed upstream Shotwell trunk, the packaging from our desktop team, send to Launchpad, and it spit out dailies. Now we’re cooking with Crisco; we’ll be able to easily make daily builds of everything we ship on the desktop right off the bat, and anything we can import. That’s a pretty nice service for application authors, thanks Launchpad!

Check out the documentation, and please remember that it’s still a work in progress, but we’ve got top people working on it. ;)

Daily Builds for Upstream Projects

Over the next few weeks the folks on the Launchpad team will be landing various bits for Daily Builds in Launchpad. I thought I’d talk about this feature because it can be a very useful tool for software projects.

So first of all, why? We want to enable you to get the latest build out to testers as soon as possible. Need someone to confirm that you’ve finally caught that regression? Or perhaps get some more testing on that feature you just landed? Dailies are for you.

The recipes are pretty easy, basically “grab trunk from launchpad here, and mush it together with this packaging branch from here”. Since we’re starting to keep our packaging branches in Launchpad this shouldn’t be too tough.

So while it’s not spitting out builds just yet, you can definitely get your code imported and your recipe done. Here’s how to get started. If you’re an upstream project and you need help with this, as always feel free to ping me. You can follow the spec for the list of apps we’ll be setting up after the feature lands, and of course we encourage you to set up your own!