Canonical Plans a Version-Tracking Tool for Devs 90
daria42 writes "Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has started work on a new project which aims to make easier for Linux developers to find the latest open source software updates, no matter which distribution they are contributing to. The effort encompasses distributed bug tracking, revision control, language translations and more. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth wants Ubuntu to take advantage of the software, saying: 'As the framework [for using code from across the community] sets, hopefully we are at the centre of it. Further down the pipeline we may need to differentiate on other grounds.'"
This doesn't really fix the problem. (Score:2, Insightful)
IMHO
Re:This doesn't really fix the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because CVS and Subversion are centralized versioning systems. Bazaar [bazaar-ng.org] and other Arch-like systems aren't. The way things are right now, bug tracking systems and code versioning systems are completely separate. If you can integrate a bug tracking system with something like Arch and retain the distributed nature of it all, then it will definitely be useful for multiple distributions. It's all patches. I think this is the direction they're trying to take things.
CVS and Subversion are centralised (Score:5, Interesting)
Systems such as ARCH allow a virtual repository that is fragmented across multiple servers - some of which might be official, and some might not.
This lets you branch from a project, but still remain in sync with it, and more importantly do so without permission or help from the official repository.
There is a lot more to it too.
Re:This doesn't really fix the problem. (Score:1)
Launchpad (Score:5, Informative)
Before you ask, Launchpad isn't open source. Yet. [ubuntulinux.org]
Re:Launchpad (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Launchpad (Score:2)
Re:Launchpad (Score:1, Funny)
Obviously, it's because they are evil. At least, that's what Slashdot says about other companies that don't release OSS software.
Well, okay, I'll admit that they aren't evil, because it isn't a double standard if it involves Linux.</sarcasm>
Re:Launchpad (Score:1)
It follows from the object at hand: It isn't intended as a tool that everyone installs on his private box to do his own translations. Rather, you are asked to do your translations using *the* Rosetta, on the Canonical site.
It's simply a service, not a product. Asking to make it "Open Source" is just like asking google to make it "Open Source"...
Re:Launchpad (Score:1)
Canonical may release the Rosetta code at some point, but the benefit will be the database of translations. There's not much point in running Rosetta on two different systems, since the whole benefit is sharing translations among multiple distros and upstream and downstream packages.
red flag (Score:1, Interesting)
This post was going to be along the lines of "talk is cheap, I'll believe it when I see it" but here, look at the language they use:
No, Rosetta is not Open or Free Software at the moment. Rosetta will probably become open source somewhere in the future but we don't have a date.
That's hardly even a promise. They are now propriatary software developers, and it is immoral to support ubunto because of it, unfortunatly.
Re:red flag (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to understand that OSS licensing is merely a set of terms in a transaction. If the terms are suitable for you, fine, if not, fine, but it isn't a moral dillema at all.
It is entirely possible to argue against closed standards without using the morality card (which really makes you look immature, BTW). What about investment protection? What about risk mitigation? What about cost savings? What about interoperability?
I could rant for days on end against Microsoft, for example, and not once say they are immoral. While they certainly have very poor ethics, I'm not convinced it comes down to fire-and-brimstone morality, yet.
red flag-RMSism. (Score:1, Interesting)
RMS would disagree with you.
Re:red flag-RMSism. (Score:1)
I said OSS. RMS tries to bring it all under an umbrella of morality and politics, which is more baggage than most people really need. I think there is a good reason why the Libertarian nutcases tended to focus on OSI over FSF, because they understand that people are free to live life on their own terms, with or without a manifesto.
Re:red flag (Score:1, Insightful)
But I wouldn't want to because it delutes my main arguement: that denying the world the source code is not nice and undermines the reason we allow copyright in the first place. Information wants to be free.
What about investment protection? What about risk mitigation? What about cost savings? What about interoperability?
I don't care about any of that. Why would I? It might make sense for businesses, but I'm not
Re:red flag (Score:2)
Simular to how Philosophy and Religeon are alike yet different.
Try googling the terms together and checking some online dictionaries and such for a better understanding.
A few simple examples (and likely simple enough to spark some dissagreement/nitpicking correction) would be a company deliberately not making thier software as good as they could reasonably do so that customers have an incentive to buy the next version. This could be ca
Re:red flag (Score:2)
Having some experience with Solaris, I had no trouble installing Solaris 10 (free download), working around a couple minor issues, and installing new software even with new icon
Re:red flag (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd be really interested to know what your reason for allowing copyright is, if not to allow author's of a work to have some control over it.
I don't care about any of that. Why would I? It might make sense for businesses, but I'm not in the business of helping businesses to do better business.
You're putting forth an argument about morality. Such arguments have limited use if they only take
Re:red flag (Score:1, Informative)
To maximize the amount of material in the public domain by funding its development.
I can't comment on your second paragraph; I didn't understand it.
Re:red flag (Score:2)
that denying the world the source code is not nice and undermines the reason we allow copyright in the first place. Information wants to be free.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized. There are many situation where it makes sence to keep information proprietary. There are many situtations where the greater community will actually benefit from closed information.
Also, how is it not nice? Who do I harm if I keep my source closed? I may not b
Re:red flag (Score:1, Insightful)
The Stand-in phrase in place of an arguement.: "You need to understand that"
A possible re-write would be: It is entirely possible to argue against slavery without using the morality card (which really makes you look immature, BTW).
You have presented a number of other reasons why propriatary software development might be a bad idea, as opposed to immoral, but have not said why the previous posters claim that it is immoral is false. If yo
Re:red flag (Score:1)
Ugh, slavery is the new Nazism regarding Godwin's Law. I'll add stock prices, too. Okay, the new Godwin's Law is: If you mention slavery, Nazism, or compare stock prices in a thread, that thread is immediately terminated and no further argument can commence.
Re:red flag (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:red flag (Score:1)
Oh, fitting subject.
Re:red flag (Score:2)
So is it also immoral to support Suse because Novell has some proprietary products? Or IBM, even though they make huge contributions to the Linux kernel, because they are primarily a proprietary software vendor?
Ubuntu is still FOSS.
Re:red flag (Score:1)
Wrong. You are missing the point. It's not as if Canonical sells Rosetta as a proprietary product. It's not a product *at all*; it's a service.
The remark about it becoming "Open Source" in the future, really just means that it *might* become a product at some point; and then, *of course* it would be "Open Source".
I accede that the FAQ entry is confusing, though
Service (Score:1)
Exactly. Like Google or Yahoo. Seen the code to either of those?
Differentiate...? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I would like to know is, are they going to spin it off into a commercial version as well (ala xchat) or simply live off of support or something else?
Differentiate...?-GPL with Octane. (Score:1, Interesting)
Well the mantra around here is "live off the support".
Re:Differentiate...?-GPL with Octane. (Score:4, Interesting)
The big draw for Ubuntu of course would be that the main version is always free... That means they have to have an idea to make money without per-seat fees... i.e. you'll download the free version for all your desktops and they'll make profit from helping you write custom software? I could see it spun as they help your business with tools and your payments directly help the community... i.e. schools, employees, etc. when it's something you'd pay for anyway.. I'm interested to see where he takes this!
Re:Differentiate...? (Score:1)
Re:Differentiate...? (Score:2)
(Whether it is really a good idea for distributions to ship software that varies ve
Nifty. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Already exists. (Score:1)
I'm talking about a program that tailors itself to your system, by using as much automatic configuration as possible. pkgsrc doesn't support everything.
*flame on* (Score:1)
Re:yawn (Score:1, Funny)
Watch out for SU! Microsoft's next version of SU is going to require a biometric suppository, which will cost $49.95 each. The result will be forced sharing at the office to cut costs, and, personally, I am not comfortable with that.
difference between need and CVS, etc... (Score:5, Insightful)
CVS was a good start, and Gentoo takes the next step, but they all require somebody to be "developer in the middle" for every single configuration decision. Debian is very cool in that it seeks to always provide a "foundation" to build on, but it's much too slow advancing [updating the foundation] for "internet" usage. I've thought it was time for a while now to develop the "next" system... which I could gaurantee is unique to OSS and nobody else. Gentoo's ebuild is great, but it doesn't go back to the developer/ outside of gentoo. Think about this a minute... if Gentoo is source only, then it should be simple to make a ebuild for any other distro too... but "it's not that easy" you say... I'd ask WHY?
Ideally, every person who compiles should be able to submit their results "upstream" as well as "downstream" that's the current distro problem we face now. Every distro fixes things differently, but the original author can't keep up with all the changes coming from a dozen distros... so they all stay "fragmented". The "next" system should fix bugs once... and be able to relay the issues back to the guy who maintains that particular piece of source code. Gentoo comes close, but it can't "put back" and suggest changes and test cases to the original developer... That's the step that's slowing down development all around. It's the need for things like drivers and kernel modules to fix third- and fourth- levels of interaction... the best testing environment is the "real world" because there are far more combinations of programs out there than any one developer could ever hope to test... The ability to guess where a bug might be by looking at logs from ALL the compiled versions... and see what's breaking stuff... to reduce the reliance on "custom" distros, you need a sytem that can spot bugs that happen once per thousand or even ten-thousand users... The other advantage is that proprietary developers would be able to tap the same up-to-date pool for their projects... so they wouldn't be pertually "out of the loop" dragging things down!!
C.I.S.S. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:C.I.S.S. (Score:2)
Like somebody else questioned, the corperate benifit would be pooling the resources that allow the free version to operate... then your employees
Re:difference between need and CVS, etc... (Score:1)
The Patron Saint of OSS. (Score:3, Interesting)
and
So in other words it takes both a secure position and money to make things happen in the OSS world. No vow of poverty there.
Re:The Patron Saint of OSS. (Score:2)
I could see this as a great business model for them. Provide premium subscriptions to the archive for developers of Proprietary stuff with the gaurantee their stuff would work with all the supported Ubuntu versions!
Re:The Patron Saint of OSS. (Score:2)
in my personal work experience there's not much my company would have to fear from using GPL'd code. The stuff we write remains inside our company... it would be breaking the law for even me [who wrote it] to release it without permission... that's cut-and-dry. For all the other stuff though, browsers, word processors, etc. that's not our business, just a tool
regulations!!! (Score:2)
Let's break out the alphabit soup... HIPPA, FDA, MIL SPEC, SOX, ISO, TS, QS, ... & TAXES!!! and the list goes on... if you could create a system to allow businesses to share resources for compliance with all the regulations you'd make a mint. It's something that no major software company does right now.. even the mighty MS and IBM leave you to fend for yourselves on the real "meat" of running a bus
Re:Money can be a very usefull tool (Score:1, Offtopic)
SourceForge.net? (Score:2, Interesting)
A File System for Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Could name it VCFS (Version Control File System)...has anyone used those letters before (amid the NTFS, NFS, SMB, VFAT file systems)?
Re:A File System for Linux (Score:1)
It has been 6 years since I last used it, so I can't comment on the slow and buggy parts.
Re:A File System for Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem isn't "keeping track of lots of files as they get updated and their versions change". If it was, CVS would be the perfect solution.
The problem is "ensuring my changes don't break something you've just added", "integrating this with a bug management system so we know who committed what in order to fix what bugs", "making it easy for me to work on a long-term pet project, while not being obliged to commit this project to the main source tr
VMS file system (Score:2)
Yes, and fortunately, VMS is history.
Re:A File System for Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A File System for Linux (Score:2, Informative)
http://veritas.com/Products/www?c=product&refId=2
VCFS (Virtual CVS File System)
http://vcfs.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
doesn't work well (Score:4, Insightful)
At this point, it is doubtful to me that anything remotely related to versioning or metadata belongs anywhere near the kernel. But if it does, then the right way to provide it is via user-level servers (like Plan 9), not by hacking stuff deep into the bowels of the file system. Simple versioning, like the kind that has been provided in file systems, could be safely, transparently, and simply provided in the C library, in a way analogous to the way Emacs does it.
ClearCase does this (Score:1)
rosetta (Score:1)
Re:rosetta (Score:1)
Launchpad's Rosetta (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Launchpad's Rosetta (Score:2)
preferably someone who can actually write
SourceForge, Savanna, ..., integration (Score:2, Insightful)
What we need is an OPEN STANDARD that everybody want's to integrate into their system so it can truely be distributed instead of going to yet another site that doesn't want to play along with the other kids.
e.g.
> reportbug SomePackage
should send a bug to the debian bug tracking software, which in turn wi
It's already been done (Score:5, Informative)
This has already been done by Specifix / Foresight Linux (www.foresightlinux.com)
These distros use a system called Conary, developed in part by the guy behind RPM, and the idea of Conary is to offer distro independent management.
Troves can be shadowed between distros, so you can create a distro easily by shadowing a "parent" distro and picking and choosing your updates.
It stores source code and changesets, so all you Gentoo ricers can do an emerge from conary, and the rest of us sane people can just pull up the changesets that give the system instructions on what to change to install package "xyz". The other beauty of changesets is that it gives a degree of distro neutrality.
Bizarre that Ubuntu want to reinvent the wheel rather than contributing to something that already exists.
Re:It's already been done (Score:1)
> Why exactly are Ubuntu attempting to recreate the wheel here?
>
> This has already been done by Specifix / Foresight Linux (www.foresightlinux.com)
>
> These distros use a system called Conary, developed in part by the guy behind RPM,
(...who reinvented the wheel creating RPM when he could have used the already existing dpkg instead?...
Re:It's already been done (Score:2)
I'm an Ubuntu user and feel a slight aggravation in your posting directed towards my distro of choice, while the software on topic is developed by Canonical and I don't really care what they do with their time.
Where's the Source? (Score:2)
In other words, they want to host it and control it -- they see that as a way of carving differentiation for Canonical.
But they're not releasing the source code for the project (at least not yet). You can share code, etc., using launchpad, but you can't (for example) use malone in your own project as an alternative to bugzilla.
I believe that these guys wouldn't