polka dot blog

As you may be aware, Lubuntu is transitioning from GTK to Qt graphics libraries, which means a transition from LXDE to LXQt. Same people, more or less, just different libs. Of course, every component is different. We finally have packages in Debian and Ubuntu Xenial. There's even instructions on how to install them!

We needed to subscribe our Lubuntu Packages Team to all of these bug mails. Sure, we could have went to 18 different source package pages and just clicked our way to it, but that kind of takes a darn while.

Luckily there's a solution: launchpadlib. Just a pip install away (or use package python-launchpadlib), it gives you all sorts of control over and access to Launchpad data. It's almost better than using the web interface! Well, assuming you're fine with Python.

In our case here, it's possible to simply name a team and/or person and give it a list of packages and have it subscribe them all. Takes a few seconds after you have the code, which you can find here. The meat of the code is one line:

lp.distributions['ubuntu'].getSourcePackage(name=filearray[i]).addBugSubscription(subscriber=lp.people[teamtowrite])

which is basically like saying for a particular source package in the Ubuntu project, add a bug subscription for the particular team or person. Heck, it almost reads like normal English.

This might be useful for normal people, too. Say you wanted to subscribe to all the bugs for a particular set of packages you're helping to develop. It'd be great for that.

More than anything, it shows the power of the Launchpad API and the hard work that Colin and the rest of the Launchpad team put into it!

With that, I'd like to especially thank cjwatson, dobey, and wgrant, whom were all helpful in figuring this out on IRC, as well as tsimonq2, who was responsible for the majority of the code.