Tag: debian

Working on standard forge exchange format

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)

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.

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.

First webcast of a demonstrator of our bug ontology’s use

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.