LottaNZB 0.6 Daily Builds available
July 7th, 2010 - SeverinIn the past months, I wrote two posts about the progress of LottaNZB 0.6, but no code was released for testing. This is because some important features of LottaNZB 0.6 were not yet implemented and also, the overall stability of the application needed to be improved. In June, LottaNZB’s development was as active as never before. There were a staggering number of 310 commits. All of them have contributed to LottaNZB 0.6 getting closer to a release and ready for testing.
It’s a pleasure for me to announce the availability of a brand-new PPA with daily builds of LottaNZB 0.6 (ppa:lottanzb/daily-build). It provides packages for both Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04. Additionally, as LottaNZB 0.6 requires SABnzbd 0.5.2 or newer, which is not available in these versions of Ubuntu, it’s recommended to use the SABnzbd PPA (ppa:jcfp/ppa) maintained by JCFP which always contains the latest version of SABnzbd. Instructions on how to add these PPAs to your software sources can be found by following the two links.
Launchpad.net is currently in the process of gaining an exciting new feature called recipes, allowing developers to request PPA builds from a source branch using only a few clicks. This greatly lowers the barrier for testing, as adding a PPA is much easier than downloading the source and its dependencies, building and installing it. From the view of the developer, less time is wasted preparing releases and writing release announcements 
. Most importantly, fixes are made available much quicker, tightening the feedback loop between developers and testers.
As with all pre-release software, it’s important for you to know that the daily builds will not be perfectly stable. This is the whole point of daily builds, as I recommend all testers to report any bugs, glitches, papercuts, etc. so that they can be fixed before the actual release of LottaNZB 0.6. You can report bugs by directly visiting LottaNZB’s project page. It’s even better to run
ubuntu-bug lottanzb
in a terminal, causing relevant files like logs and configuration files to be attached to the bug report automatically. By default, those bugs will not be visible to anyone except you and the LottaNZB Development Team. Additionally, most of the sensitive information like usernames and passwords is removed beforehand.
Also, please note that unfinished downloads will not be migrated from LottaNZB 0.5 (HellaNZB-based) to LottaNZB 0.6 (SABnzbd-based). The final version of LottaNZB 0.6 might do that. In the meanwhile it’s recommended to complete all downloads before making the switch to LottaNZB 0.6.
Of course, it would not only be great to get bug reports, but also general feedback regarding LottaNZB 0.6. You can also ask questions here or at Launchpad’s Answer section. Unfortunately, it’s only possible to use PPAs on Ubuntu and its derivatives. Of course, users of other distributions are also encouraged to participate in testing. You’re free to get LottaNZB’s source code and follow the instructions in the README file.
Besides tons of bug fixes, new features have also been introduced since the last progress report. Originally, I wanted to give you an overview of the most interesting additions, but while going through the commit log, I noticed that there were just too many of them to cover in the blog post about daily builds. This is why the new features will be presented in a separate post in the near future.
Happy testing!
July 7th, 2010 at 1:12 am
Great work!
It’s running already and works fine so far. I hope to see a good progress in the next months.
July 7th, 2010 at 2:04 am
Awesome, glad to see an upstream application take advantage of this!
July 20th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Could you make the LottaNZB daily builds available for maverick to? (for now I’ve changed the source for the daily-build PPA to “lucid” manually).
Anyway, I’ve just started using LottaNZB and love the Gnomish Usability of it. Very smooth experience so far!
July 20th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
@Bram: The reason why there are currently no daily builds for both Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and 10.10 (Maverick) is that there are two unresolved bugs (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-code/+bug/599102 and https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-code/+bug/599100 ) that prevent the builds from succeeding. I’ve reported them to the Launchpad.net developers and they will hopefully be fixed soon.
Thanks for your feedback on LottaNZB 0.6! I really appreciate it. It’s indeed very important to me that LottaNZB adheres to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Don’t hesitate to report a bug if you notice anything that violates it or in general, harms usability in any way.
July 29th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
find ich toll !
July 31st, 2010 at 9:43 am
Is this a Open-Source project or and Ubuntu project?
From the looks of the site at first glance it has nothing to do with Ubuntu but then a closer look, Launchpad, Ubuntu bug reporting, PPA builds for Ubuntu, Bazaar and so on….
Please don’t be wrapped up so much in Canonical, there’s a BIG world of Linux out there and so much of your site seems to be only geared towards Ubuntu and you’re going to turn the rest of the Liniux community off thinking all this is, is for Ubuntu and it shouldn’t be like that at all, if this is just an Open-Source project, you shouldn’t be so focused on one distro unless all you are doing is building for them.
I hope you will switch gears on this and appear a bit more friendly to Linux in general and not appear so biased towards Ubuntu. I personally don’t like Ubuntu and there are other great distros out there.
So what are you a Ubuntu project or a Linux open-source project?
Yes it’s silly to be a Fan boy for a certain distro but they are out there and what they use in their mind is the best and some of the others are trash. Just remember that ‘Distro Wars’ do exist this is why as an open-source project you should be looking like you are favoring one particular distro over another, you look like you are playing favoritism to them and leaving the rest of us out.
August 7th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
@Xgates: Please take a look at this blog post for a response to your question.
August 11th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Hi there, great work,
Will the inhibit shutdown/standby option be coming back ?
Many thanks,
-msh
August 14th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
@msh: This functionality was implemented as a plug-in in LottaNZB 0.5. In order to prevent the release of LottaNZB 0.6 from being delayed even further, the plug-in infrastructure will be ported in a later release, which means that LottaNZB 0.6 won’t be capable of inhibiting shutdown/standby.
However, once the plug-in infrastructure is in place, thanks to SABnzbd, it will not only be possible to implement a plug-in that inhibits shutdown/standby while downloading, but also provide the option of shutting down or hibernating the computer automatically after all downloads have been completed.
August 30th, 2010 at 10:29 am
@Bram: Daily builds for Maverick have finally arrived. Enjoy!
September 21st, 2010 at 4:47 am
nice post. thanks.
October 23rd, 2010 at 9:33 am
Hi Severin hope things are going good with 0.6, been a while since I played with it in Slack.
Can you please put up daily tars somewhere for me to compile and test it for you…
THANKS
October 23rd, 2010 at 11:50 am
@DasFox: Here’s the up-to-date tarball you’ve asked for: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/232786/lottanzb-0.6.tar.gz Note that it will not be updated daily. Let me know if you encounter any problems.
November 15th, 2010 at 11:44 am
THANKS for the tar ball can you please maybe make a link on the site where others can download the tars when they are updated?
THANKS
December 6th, 2010 at 3:54 am
Do you have GIT for Lottanzb we can pull down daily builds from?
THANKS
December 19th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
@DasFox: We use Bazaar, which works essentially the same way as GIT. You can get the source code by running “bzr branch lp:lottanzb”. Then, you can run the code locally using “./run-lottanzb.sh”.