Here are some notes I took about the lecture “Debbugs – New developments in the ongoing struggle against bugs” by Don Armstrong at Debconf 10 (that I watched from the stream).
Note that the slides are at : http://rzlab.ucr.edu/debian/debbugs_presentation_debconf10.pdf, and here, I’ll only mention most noteworthy elements I’ve noticed.
Here are my notes about the very insteresting BOF on distributed bugtrackers held at DebConf
This is just some elements of report (some taken from the gobby edits, and written down by me after watching the video (unfortunately missing 2 mins of sound in the beginning of the video stream/recording)). This is not a full report of all the discussions, as some discussed elements weren’t of interest IMHO.
You’ll find here many ideas of mine, links and pointers (resulting of our work in the context of the Helios project on similar topics), so this is in no way a report of what was said exactly during the BOF.
This is a quick report and notes about the great presentation made at DebConf on “Distributed bug tracking for Debian with SD” by Christine Spang (http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/591.en.html)
Hopefully, the slides are gonna be published soon, but in the meantime, you have them in the video recording (see link above) – EDIT: she has published here slides : see her blog post.
For those who don’t know SD, they may refer to a talk given by its author, Jesse Vincent, at the recent RMLL/LSM 2010 : Peer to peer issue tracking with SD and Prophet (video recording coming soon : EDIT: a premiere recording is available here).
She draws 2 main use cases in her speech, which is exactly the kind of features we’ve been thinking about for fetchbugs4.me :
A new paper of ours was just published. If you’re curious about all that Semantic Web and Linked Data hype and how it would impact forges and other software development tools, and the link with Open Source development platforms, then, read this :
Weaving a Semantic Web Across OSS Repositories: Unleashing a New Potential for Academia and Practice
(DOI:10.4018/jossp.2010040103)
Authors: Olivier Berger (Institut Telecom, France); Valentin Vlasceanu (Institut Telecom, France); Christian Bac (Institut Telecom, France); Quang Vu Dang (Institut Telecom, France); Stéphane Lauriere (Mandriva, France)
in International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes (IJOSSP) Volume: 2, Issue: 2 (2010), Pages: 29-40 pp.
Here’s the abstract:
(more…)
Free Electrons vient de mettre en ligne des vidéos des conférences qu’ils ont filmées aux RMLL 2009.
Une partie des vidéos porte sur le thème “Développement” que j’ai coordonné.
Voici la liste des interventions filmées :
Le son n’est pas toujours top, mais c’est fait avec les moyens du bord, bénévolement 
Vous trouverez les pointeurs vers les vidéos et les slides chez Free Electrons (en bas de liste).
Et n’oubliez pas : l’édition 2010 remet ça, avec un appel à contributions toujours ouvert.
You work on developing a software forge, you’re an admin for a software forge, or a project administrator.
Join us and discuss (in english) forge matters on discussions@planetforge.org, to try and improve communication, sharing, reuse and interoperability among various hosting platforms, and collaborative development tools.
You may prefer joining the PlanetForge RSS aggregator if you blog about forges (feel free to add it to your preferred RSS reader).
As part of COCLICO, we’re working on an exchange format for forges, that should help dump, restore, export and import from different software forges.
There are various use cases for this, like moving a project from one forge to another, but also as backup/restore feature for forge admins. More about the rationale here.
We’d like this format to be a standard some day, so it should have good properties so that it’s generic enough and at the same time easy to adopt. Thus it would be relatively easy to contribute new exporters or importers to an framework (for which we’ll implement basic core tools), while having a long-lasting format that can still be used in the future.
A lot of work ahead of us, and this is just a short notice in case you’re interested and you’d like to know more
Stay tuned, and if interested, join discussions@planetforge.org to discuss this topic.
P.S.: yes, it’s a rebirth of CoopX, somehow (see the coopx tag in my blog for more details)
OSLC-CM V1 is a proposed standard for REST APIs of bugtrackers, and in our seek for more interoperability in the bugtracker space, we’ve been very interested in it.
OSLC-CM is quite young and only so far implemented in proprietary tools (although elaborated in an open way) on the server side, and as we believe in FLOSS, we’ve started trying to implement basics of server side plugins for a few bugtrackers.
In addition to a demo server that’s simulating the behaviour of a bugtracker, we have started implementing a Mantis plugin and FusionForge and Codendi trackers add-ons (all PHP and based on Zend framework, see this project on picoforge). All are very basic, but we hope they will be the basis for future OSLC-CM compatible servers in these tools.
At the same time we’ve been experimenting with the code already published in Mylyn to support OSLC-CM on the client side. Not everything is public yet in Mylyn, as the elements that have been developped for some connectors of Tasktop to the proprietary tools are being ported to the open source code of Mylyn.
We have thus been able to use the Junit tests classes of Mylyn and tweak them in a way to connect to an instance of the demo server for Mantis (including handling some Basic auth), and be able to retrieve the first bugs descriptions 
Now that this works, we’ll try and add some Java code (maybe reusing Mylyn client libs) to doc4 (being developped as part of Helios) in order to start linking doc4 and Mantis so that this can be used in the Helios platform. This may involve mixing code of XWiki and Mylyn… hmmm… well, we’ll see.
Next steps may be also to try and implement a connector in Python that might be used in tools like bts-link.
Then whichever Python or Java client libraries we have, will allow us to use them inside FetchBugs4.me to connect and harvest bugs of OSLC-CM compliant bugtrackers eventually.
Lots of interesting developments ahead. Stay tuned.
The twiki package has been removed from Debian.
The package was not really maintained, and twiki’s maintenance still required some attention, as there were quite a lot security issues. So the removal is logical.
I had tried and help maintain it in good shape, but couldn’t do much recently, as we’ve moved a little bit away from its inegration in PicoForge, having other matters to care for in Helios and Coclico these days.
Maybe foswiki (the more open fork of twiki) will enter Debian some day. The ITP is there, and there are unofficial packages to be tested, for those that would need to transition from the previous installations of twiki on Debian. More details in the fowsiki ITP.
Anyway, thanks for all the good work to all those who spent time working on TWiki’s packages in Debian.
As for me, maybe some day, I’ll be interested in contributing some time to Foswiki, should we deploy it alongside FusionForge some day.
We have setup, as part of our work in Helios, a very early demonstrator of a database of RDF facts about bugs in several distributions (currently Debian and Mandriva), in order to try and validate the Ontology describing bugs that we develop.
Here’s a pointer to the first webcast on fetchbugs4.me’s blog, with more details.
To summarize some ideas and try and promote the work we’ve done in the frame of Helios, we’ve submitted a short paper (PDF) to the triplification challenge.
Alas, others had better projects, and we didn’t win, apparently. Still, we’ll continue to work beyond these initial demonstrators, in order to try and push for a standard of interchange of “facts” / meta-data about bugs, for instance as RDF using the EvoOnt BOM ontology plus our extensions.
The paper describes the 2 first demonstrators that we’ve setup (and for which I previously blogged) : one for the triplification of bugzilla, and one for the triplification about Debian bugs, using UDD to do so.
Abstract: To interconnect bugtrackers, and especially the one used to manage free
software projects, one need tools to convert their custom format to a common interop-
erable form. We, in the context of the Helios project, are working on refining existing
ontologies to describe bugs from the most used bugtrackers in open source software. We
propose two prototypes for review, based on triplify and EvoOnt BOM, which export
bugs from bugzilla installations and Debian’s UDD in the form of RDF triples.
Read the rest in “Bugtrackers triplification” (PDF)
Hi all Debian news addicts. If all goes well, I should now be part of the Debian planet, thanks to the good Planet Maintainers.
In a few words, I’m a Debian Maintainer, and long time Debian fan (although sometimes disappointed by it, but love hate relationship is sustainable in the long run, it seems ).
My most significant contributions have been on helping maintain bts-link… and generally I’m interested very much in bugtracking, Semantic Web, and tying that with what’s done in Debian and more generally in Free Software. I’m focusing on these aspects as part of our Helios project funded to work on producing FLOSS
My debian tag‘s feed will tell more about me and my progress in contributing to Debian, from now on.
I’ve blogged often about our efforts around RDF and UDD in recent times.
This time, we have used triplify to export contents of some tables of the Debian UDD database to provide information about Debian bugs facts as RDF feeds (using our ontology based on EvoOnt BOM).
More details at : https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/TriplifyUddToRdf including a link to the demonstration server.
With our help (in the frame of our work on Mantis in the Helios project), the version in Debian testing of Mantis is now in sync with upstream (1.1.8) : http://packages.qa.debian.org/m/mantis/news/20090709T163923Z.html
Next steps, integrate Mantis in the Helios platform for real… and maybe more contributions in Mantis, and maybe on the Mandriva packaging of it. Stay tuned.
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