Larval prototype for Launchpad dashboards

I mentioned a while ago that I really want to see something like a dashboard in Launchpad, some kind of view that shows you everything that you must do, everything that you are waiting on from others and all of your current work-in-progress. Launchpad could do this really well, since it has rich, inter-linked data about what's going on and since it can show you this information for all of your projects.

Today, I knocked up a very quick-and-dirty prototype for this. It shows all of the work-in-progress for a person across all of Launchpad, grouped by project.

The code lives at lp:~jml/+junk/whip and you can see examples of my work-in-progress and jelmer's work-in-progress online. You should be able to make your own with './bin/whip $LP-NAME > wip.html'. Note that there'll be some PYTHONPATH shenanigans.

Hackers, I'd love to see if you could turn this prototype into a web-app, or even a page on Launchpad. There's a NOTES file in there with whatever ideas I've had.

Designers, there's got to be a better way of showing this data than what I've picked. Take a look at the examples and see what you can turn them into.

testtools 0.9.8 released

The announcement is a few days late, but I thought that you'd like to know that testtools 0.9.8 has been released.

This is one of our biggest releases, we have fixed a lot of bugs, added experimental support for running tests inside Twisted's reactor and added a stack of new matchers and convenience methods. It's well worth upgrading.

We've also got some good stuff in the pipeline, including a full re-working of our documentation, better error messages and still more matchers.

The "more matchers" thing is significant. More and more people are starting to use testtools because of the way our matchers let them build domain-specific assertions with rich, useful error messages. We continue to get contributions for basic matchers and for new ways of combining matchers. Also, projects like James Westby's soupmatchers show just how useful matchers can be. It makes me think that eventually matchers will become part of the normal way that people write tests in Python.

Thanks to Robert Collins, Martin [gz], Jelmer Vernooij, Michael Hudson-Doyle and James Westby for making this our best release ever.

testtools bug update

Hello testtools fans.

If you are wondering what all the recent bug mail was about, wonder no more, for I shall explain. Thus.

We're using only three different levels of importance for testtools bugs: Critical, Medium and Wishlist. Critical is reserved for release blockers: regressions, test failures and other disasters. Medium is for genuine defects and other things that we think are important. Wishlist is for everything else. I think of them as Critical, Important and Someday.

All of this is in preparation for the 0.9.8 release, which promises to be a doozy.  Stay tuned.