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)
Le projet COCLICO invite les développeurs et utilisateurs de FusionForge à se retrouver à Issy les Moulineaux (France) le 3 février 2010 pour une journée destinée au travail technique sur ce logiciel.
Pour plus de détails veuillez vous référer à l’annonce en anglais : FusionForge developers/users meeting coming up, notamment pour les détails sur le contact des organisateurs.
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.
I’m glad the COCLICO project, even if not yet officially started, is already motivating interesting progress.
Of course a first side effect was a more tightened community of actors who’ve evolved the still libre version of GForge into FusionForge.
Another recent event is the release of Codendi which is at last freely downloadable, and which is claimed by Xerox as a move in the direction of the COCLICO project.
Glad to see things moving in the right direction.
Pour info, le projet COCLICO devrait commencer prochainement, et nous devrons recruter des CDD pour accompagner l’effort de développement sur le projet.
Tous les détails ne sont pas encore précisés, mais pour info, voici déjà un descriptif général de nos besoins.
Envie de travailler dans le logiciel libre : prenez le temps de jeter un coup d’oeil sur notre descriptif
Le projet COCLICO, au montage duquel nous avons participé, vient d’être retenu dans les résultats du 7ème appel à projets FUI (pôles de compétitivité).
Cela augure de travaux sur la convergence entre différentes forges de développement logiciel dans les prochains mois, le tout en logiciel libre bien entendu car labellisé sur le Groupe Thématique Logiciels Libres du pôle System@tic (ainsi que par le pôle Minalogic).
Plus de news bientôt.
Gforge 4.5 is the FLOSS version of GForge, that most of us can download, install, for instance as Debian packages.
But for some users looking for “the” latest, most up-to-date GForge, there’s a risk to go test (and buy) a non-free version of GForge AS, the “proprietary” version made by the main initial author of GForge, Tim Perdue (through his company GForge Group). While having a new product developed by a company which contributed to the liberation of GForge is not necessarily bad, the problem is that this confusion hinders the momentum for contributions to the free code base.
There seem to be some movement in the GForge community these days, towards more dynamics on the development of this leading FLOSS project, which hosts so many interesting libre projects.
Update 2009/01/25 :Expect some announcement in the forthcoming days on this front. Roland Mas has just announced what I was more or less announcing in this teaser : FusionForge has forked been announced.
Hi.
I’ll be chairing the “development” track at the forecoming (10th edition) LSM/RMLL which will happen in July in Nantes (France).
I expect contributions about FLOSS development, so will soon push a formal call for contributions/communications, but here’s already the description of the track contents : Call for Communication concerning the “Development” topic of the 10th Libre Software Meeting (Nantes, France, july 2009) .
If you feel interested in co-chairing, I’d be glad to know
Pour info, le 21 janvier prochain aura lieu la prochaine rencontre de la communauté des forgerons francophones, dans le même esprit que la rencontre précédente de juin dernier.
Pour info, le descriptif complet de la rencontre prévue à La Cantine :
(more…)
I’m passing the word about the OpenForge initiative whose goal is apparently try and foster interoperability between forges. Thanks to Nicolas Guerin for the pointer.
Great, I’ll keep an eye on that.
Excerpt from http://openforge.info/ :
OpenForge is an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows different development forges to communicate with each other. All the work is focused on interoperability. With this API, you can imagine a lot of features based on the aims:
* retrieve project’s datas
* retrieve user’s datas
* search for a user or a project
Quite similar to ideas entertained at wiki.planetforge.org
We’re hiring a software engineer, for 15 months, to work on bugtrackers synchronisation
(see full version of the offered job description here — et une version en français également : ici)
We’re looking for a software engineer to join our PFTCR team, in order to complement our R&D manpower on the HELIOS project. We’re responsible for a work package whose goal is to study and implement a system which would fit in the HELIOS platform, to ensure synchonisation between bug-trackers.
The workplace would be here in Evry (France, Paris area) for a duration of 15 months, under a french CDD contract (starting first quarter of 2009). The development done during the work on this project will be contributed back to FLOSS projects.
Strong know-how in software development as well as interest for research issues are expected from the candidates. Also, a good knowledge of the open source development tools, and of the dynamics of the libre software development communities is expected (distributions, packaging, QA). A practical experience of contribution on an open source project would be a plus (typically as Debian developper, for instance).. Technical english skills will be required (as well as notions of french, considering the french nature of the environment).
If you’re interested and available early 2009, I definitely want to hear from you.
See more details in full version of the offered job description.
There will be some interesting content (I hope) about forges at the forecoming Open World Forum, on the first days of december, in Paris. Besides the higher education track I already blogged about, the Qualipso project organizes its second conference during the forum.
There should be some presentation of the first results of the Qualipso forge, so I’m expecting interesting things to be shown and fruitfull discussions.
The OSOR project will be around also, and some participants of our french community of forgerons, and contributors to the planetforge aggregator.
Looking forward to meet you there.
Part of our work in the Helios project will be on bugtrackers synchronisation.
I happened to notice that bts-link’s maintainer called for help, which triggered more interest in that tool.
I’ve started working on bts-link to see how it works (cool, it’s Python and if it can be useful for Helios, and started implementing GForge tracker support in bts-link. That should help keep track of Debian bugs wrt upstream bugs for projects hosted in GForge forges (like Sympa, for instance, whose bugtracker is hosted in SourceSup).
You may find my git repo at http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/git/bts-link.git which hopefull contains my proposed changes (I’m new to git, so I hope I did everything right…).
We’re seriously considering switching from phpGroupware to eGroupware for some infrastructure needed for a picoforge-based platform that we need to deploy soon.
phpGroupware is unfortunately kinda dead these days, whereas eGroupware seems to have managed to keep some momentum.
Of course we had preferred keeping with phpGroupware when the two projects initially switched apart, in particular because the GNU project-linked QA/copyright policies were a guarantee that our contributions may be better protected in such a collaboration environment (we tried and help the phpGroupware as much as we could, btw, and parts of this history is told when looking at : http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/tag/phpgroupware/).
But the copyright policy is not all about successful collaboration, and it happens that phpGroupware fails to deliver from quite a few months now. Btw, I’m not so close to the project to tell exactly what’s happening and why, but looking at the mailing-lists, at least, the situation looks very bad.
So I dare say it lound : the phpGroupware project is quietly dying (at least from my point of view).
But as we need some improvements that were initially planned for its 0.9.18 release (filemanager, accounts, various stuff I’m not really qualified to list completely)… we need to consider what the options are…
And fortunately, it looks like eGroupware has not forked in a too much differing way, from a technical point of view, and that they have even improved some of the things we expected to be coming from phpGroupware 0.9.18.
So it’s very much likely that we’re going to try and switch to eGroupware for some parts of the platform to be deployed in the next month.
This may not concern the whole of the PicoForge infrastructure but only a particular project that builds on top of the current PicoForge infrastructure, with some variations.
As for the future of PicoForge as the libre software forge, it’s not really clear what’s gonna happen, but I think that we may be making a more radical switch some day, for instance by forgetting the old legacy PHP code, and so neither depending on phpGroupware nor eGroupware, but using some more modern tools/frameworks (and why not something like Tine 2.0 ? … no, but we may be inspired by some of its characteristics .
Qui vivra verra.
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