New SF.net project for HELIOS

The Helios project is gradually going more open, as we start releasing and committing in the open into a SF.net project (heliosplatform).

Among the tools offered by SF.net we will use a blog (wordpress), the wiki (mediawiki) and the SVN, for a start.

The project’s SVN repo will be populated with all components we have developed, as we progressively switch our SVN hosting. The first piece we have committed is the Mantis OSLC REST server module.

Meeting FusionForge à l’invitation de COCLICO, à Paris le 3 février

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.

Some news of our efforts around OSLC-CM and future plans

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.

New paper on observation of contributions in forges through standard feeds

Just a quick word to mention the paper published at SITIS 2009 by our collegue Vu.

Biblio entry : DANG Quang Vu, BAC Christian, BERGER Olivier, VLASCEANU Valentin, Supporting situation awareness in FLOSS projects by semantical aggregation of tools feeds. The 5th International Conference on Signal Image Technology and Internet Based Systems (SITIS’09), 29 november – 04 december 2009, Marrakech, Morocco, 2009

At all good libraries soon 😉

Here’s the abstract :

It is rather difficult to monitor or visualize what can be the contribution of a member in a collaboration project, especially when the project uses multiple tools to produce its results. This is the case for collaborative development of FLOSS software, that uses Wiki, bug tracker, mailing lists and source code management tools. This paper presents an approach to data collection by using aggregation of feeds published by the different tools of a software forge. To allow this aggregation, collected data is semantically reformatted into Semantic Web standards: RDF, DC, DOAP, FOAF and EvoOnt. Resulting data can then be processed, re-published or displayed to project members. We implemented this approach in a supervision module that has been integrated into the PicoForge platform. This module is able to draw a live graph of the social community out of the different sources of data, and in turn exports semantic feeds for other uses.

RIP twiki in Debian

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.