DoctorMo's Blog

Hey everyone,

I’m pleased to announce the release of Ground Control 1.6, these feature features minor improvements and fixes but the main change is fixing the launchpad openid problem that stopped all new users of ground control from enjoying the integration.

I’m also pleased to announce the new ground control website which was very kindly designed by Brett Alton and produced by myself for this release. You can get the new version 1.6 from the download link on the website and please do use the Latest / PPA as the version in Lucid is 1.5 and still suffers from the launchpad openid login bug.

Any thoughts and comments please post them here, but any bugs please post them to the launchpad bug tracker.

Dear opportunistic developer community, I’m proud to release version 1.5 of ground control. This new release features a lot of stabilisation and bug fixing. We’re now much more careful about showing buttons when your not online, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see any buttons and your not connected to the internet. Only some buttons are offline use.

Some of you may also not see any buttons because we had to remove the use of XDG_PROJECTS and now we need a .groundcontrol file to exist in any directory you want to see project buttons. Don’t blame us, Debian maintainers have been really harsh to the functionality of ground control and it’s basically because we do odd things to make it easier.

But also some extra features such as the custom buttons that project maintainers can opt into. If you look at the screen-shot on the right, you’ll see that the ground control branch has two new buttons that are unique to the ground control trunk branch and you won’t see them in any other project code base. They are in italic and say “Test This Branch” and “Make Release”, these two buttons are actually scripts which help developers build and release the code base and each code base is going to be different.

If you would like your project to be able to take advantage of these buttons you simply create a .gcfunctions file in the root of your code/branch and fill it with yaml content like the example below, make sure that the scripts you reference are functional and do what you need to. I’d also advise not having more than a few buttons at any given time.

Format of file .gcfunctions:
button_id:
  name: Button Text
  command: ./scripts/to/run.sh
  show-in: [any|code-locked,code-modified,code-modified,code-commited,code-mergereq,code-uploaded,code-none,code-checkout]
  offline: [False|True] (shows button if offline if True)


Example:
make_release:
  name: Make Release
  command: ./scripts/build/make_release.sh
  show-in: code-none
  offline: False
develop:
  name: Test This Branch
  command: ./scripts/build/set_develop.sh
  show-in: any
  offline: True


I hope you enjoy this release and I can be more certain now that more people will be able to enjoy it without problems. But if you do find yourself experiencing bugs, do hop over to the launchpad bugs report area and write down your issues. Be sure to include logs (create a ~/groundcontrol.log file in your home folder to contain the logs) and give all the steps you used to reproduce the problems.

Hey everyone! I’m proud to release version 1.4 of ground control into the wild.

You can download the version 1.4 at my PPA or keep up with the daily builds of the ground control trunk (which may not always work)

So to the features in this release… We have exclent news for people like Benjamin of the ubuntu manual project, who wanted the ability to download a branch that’s owned by a group your a member of. It also should allow you to manage your project when your to primary developer.

We have the ability to merge in requests when you are the primary developer, this is marked by your branch directory having the same parent url as it’s push location. This merge request will show a list of branches with merge requests outstanding, so you don’t have to dog through and remember which branches have merge requests.

We also have a wonderful commit diff that you can see in the screenshot, what I’m done is I’ve reused the wonderful work done by the bzr-gtk developers and simply created one of their diffing windows inside of the commit window instead of making my own. This saved an aweful lot of development time, working out how to colour it in using your gedit preferences.

There are also a large number of other fixes which should help. but the majority of this release is for project managers and project owners to deal with the larger number of requests coming in thanks to ground control.

Do test and do let me know what you think, I enjoy hearing when people are using it and finding it useful.

For all those who reported that terrible missing branding bug that stopped you getting the code of your favourite projects, the new release of ground control should fix that. It’s also got a whole bunch of other fixes and improvements, including the ability to ignore new files in commits and merge/pull from the parent branch.

For all those that missed my demonstration blog entry, Ground Control is a desktop integration for your launchpad projects. It allows you to collaborate on bazaar branches if an effective and easy to follow way by removing or making smart most of the difficulties that stop contributors on the command line.

Do go check out the demonstration of version 1.0, it’s still got the core concepts and then you can download it via my ppa and enjoy checking out project code from nautilus.

Update: There was a configuration bug that’s now fixed, please try again if your attempt to use it got stuck ont he launchpad configuration.

Hey everyone, I’ve released version 1.0.6 of ground control into my PPA, this is a fairly stable Beta which I hope everyone will give a good testing.

For new users: Ground control is a project that hopes to bring the collaboration of launchpad and bazaar branches to every day users abilities. It does away with the need for a command line and has removed a lot of the complex distractions leaving a simplified workflow for users to follow. It uses all the existing libraries and practices of the community, so if you need to move back to the command line you can continue were you left off.

It’s also flexible enough to allow you to manage your existing bazaar checkouts via nautilus. If your want to.

To show you what it can do I have done a video (you have to click into my blog article to see it):

[blip.tv ?posts_id=3161227&dest=-1]

What I need now is more testing and perhaps a design review to make it easier to use. Let me know your ideas, thoughts and if you think this will be useful for getting course writers into the Ubuntu Learning project, comment below and bug reports here.

If you do have a problem and it crashes at some point, do create an empty file in your home directory called groundcontrol.log this will quickly fill up with a useful log of what’s going on and you can attach it to the bug report.

Update: I’ve made sure it’s available for both Karmic and Lucid releases.

I’ve been trying to come up with some kind of brand for my ground control project, and it’s a bit of a hard one since I think my head is far too much in the code to be able to come up with something that is both easy to recognise and visible at small pixel widths.

This is my idea:

Thoughts?

Working with a nautilus extension and with bazaar is interesting, you can’t just open up the process of a bzr branch or pull and expect everything to be rosy. It’ll lock out the GUI and then you’ll be stuck without progress reports.

So I’m happy to report that I figured out how to make it work by using examples set forth in the qbzr project (QT-Bzr) so a lil bit of rewriting and a quick re-tooling using threading.Thread and we’re ready to start making sure all the dialogues and displays don’t lock up and deliver useful progress reports of the work they’re doing.

You can get the code branch I’m working on from lp:nautilus-lp

In unrelated news, I just got the results back from an x-ray, turns out I chipped one of the bones in my foot. So I’ve been walking around UDS for the last four days with a serious injury. You won’t believe the ear full I got off the doctor for assuming all that was rong was a simple sprain.