A couple weeks ago, I wrote a quick hack for myself and the Online Services team at Canonical, to help make doing reviews on all the projects we manage, much easier. It pulls the list of branch merge proposals for each project from Launchpad, and sticks them all in a nice list in a GtkTreeView, along with the number of votes, and what type of vote. As there was a lot of immediate interest in the tool from other people, I ended up creating a new project on Launchpad, and pushing the code to a public branch there, under the GPLv3. You'll find it at http://launchpad.net/lptools. I will probably be adding other tools soon as well, as every time I have to use a web browser, it slows my progress, and interrupts my ideal workflow. If anyone else has tools they'd like to have included here, or ideas for tools, feel free to propose branches which add them, or send me mail.

I'm not a fan of Python. But I chose to write this tool in it anyway, as I wasn't intending to make a real project out of it. It was just a quick hack to make part of my life much easier, until I can get around to writing something much better and more deeply integrated with the desktop. But the GTK+ bindings, and python-launchpadlib, made it very easy to hack this script up very quickly. I do wish there was a better way to do the authentication though. Opening a browser, and requiring the user to press "Enter" in the console, is an awful experience. But it works, and I only have to do it once...

Frankly, launchpadlib makes it very easy to not have to use the web... and in some cases, makes it better, since the Launchpad web UI doesn't expose all the features that are in the API.