launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[William Grant <william.grant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 25/05/15 21:00, anatoly techtonik wrote:
> On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 12:28 PM, William Grant
> <william.grant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 25/05/15 19:02, anatoly techtonik wrote:
>>> https://dev.launchpad.net/Getting
>>>
>>> 1. I'd place tl;dr section at the top with:
>>> bzr branch lp:launchpad
>>
>> The "Getting it" section already says that, in a small section that's
>> visible without scrolling. The page's introduction includes important
>> information about supported environments and copyright licences, so a
>> TL;DR wouldn't be a good idea.
> 
> Then it is better to make the keywords bold. Including all this stuff
> doesn't mean page becomes more attractive and people like me will
> actually read it. Some facts:
> http://uxmyths.com/post/647473628/myth-people-read-on-the-web
> 
>>> 2. The download process is long (15+ minutes already)
>>> Is there a way for bzr to download only last 1000 revisions?
>>> Something like `git  clone --depth 1000 ...`?
>>> It would be worthy to mention there.
>>
>> Bazaar doesn't implement shallow branches. You need to wait for the
>> entire branch to download.
>>
>> Now that Launchpad has beta Git hosting support
>> (http://blog.launchpad.net/general/git-code-hosting-beta), we intend to
>> move the code for Launchpad itself to Git in the coming weeks. There's a
>> test import of our Bazaar branches into Git at the top of
>> https://code.launchpad.net/launchpad, from which you can do a shallow
>> clone if you desire. But it's not always up to date, and not supported
>> by the Launchpad team yet.
> 
> That would make my life easier. Is it possible to update the page with this
> info? And also update Running page with info how to run LP if you already
> have the copy of source code?

As I said, it's not ready yet. The page will be revised to use the Git
repository when Git becomes the primary VCS for Launchpad's code. Nobody
runs Launchpad from Git yet, so it's untested and we can't recommend it.
We also can't yet accept merges from Git repositories, so a Git clone is
only useful for read-only work today.

The Getting and Running pages could indeed use some work, and you have
some very good points. But I think it's a better use of time to fix them
as part of the Git rewrite, rather than making big changes to content
that's only going to exist for a handful more weeks.

>>> 3. The next page to be read is advised to be
>>> https://dev.launchpad.net/Running
>>> which uses another method. Why? Who needs to
>>> get the source without running it for development?
>>
>> Some people just want to look at the code, for example to work out why a
>> particular piece of Launchpad behaves the way it does. It's much quicker
>> to download it that way than using the full rocketfuel-setup script.
> 
> If you're going to download unusable code, it should be mention at the top of
> https://dev.launchpad.net/Getting as a first thing.
> Now after 20min+ I have a copy of sources, read them and interested
> to see how it really works. I need to repeat the download process now?
> https://dev.launchpad.net/Running

It's not unusable, but the automated setup script will not use it
without tweaking. You can pre-seed the download location from a local
branch like this:

 mkdir ~/launchpad
 bzr init-repo ~/launchpad/lp-branches
 bzr branch /path/to/local/launchpad/branch ~/launchpad/lp-branches/temp
 rm -r ~/launchpad/lp-branches/temp

rocketfuel-setup will then avoid redownloading the data, as it's already
in the shared repository that it would normally create at
~/launchpad/lp-branches.

The script will be replaced when Launchpad switches to Git, and the new
one will not be quite so picky.

>> But if you want to run it, you want to use rocketfuel-setup. That's why
>> there's no TL;DR -- you don't want to bzr branch lp:launchpad if you
>> want to do more than look at it.
> 
> This is also more complicated than necessary:
>     bzr --no-plugins cat
> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/devel/utilities/rocketfuel-setup
>> rocketfuel-setup
> why not
>    wget http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/devel/download/head:/rocketfuelsetup-20070604080655-qvg2xintg0bed61s-1/rocketfuel-setup
> ? Is it because bazaar web doesn't support pointers to latest file version
> and all downloads require specific hash?

Loggerhead, the software that Launchpad uses to provide a web UI to
browse Bazaar branches, doesn't provide a URL to download the latest
revision of a file without the rather ugly rocketfuelsetup-2007... bit.
That makes the "bzr cat" method rather less complicated, albeit slower.

Git solves this with
<https://git.launchpad.net/launchpad/plain/utilities/rocketfuel-setup>.

> P.S. Another bug - the list address is not added to CC automatically.

That's not a bug. You should use the Reply to List or Reply to All
option in your email client if you want to reply to the list. Mangling
Reply-To to the list address has been widely regarded as bad practice
for many years.


Thanks for the feedback on the Getting and Running pages. We'll
definitely keep it in mind when we rewrite them as part of the Git switch!

William.

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