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Canonical Plans a Version-Tracking Tool for Devs 90

Posted by timothy from the even-fresher-meat dept.
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.'"
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Canonical Plans a Version-Tracking Tool for Devs More

Canonical Plans a Version-Tracking Tool for Devs

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  • This is just another short-term bypass to a long-term problem. Eventually, this will be just as usefull as CVS/Subversioni is right now for open source projects on different distributions.

    IMHO :)
    • Eventually, this will be just as usefull as CVS/Subversioni is right now for open source projects on different distributions.

      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.

  • Launchpad (Score:5, Informative)

    by natrius ( 642724 ) * <niran@niEINSTEINran.org minus physicist> on Monday May 02, 2005 @12:42AM (#12404330) Homepage
    The summary gives the impression that Launchpad development just started, but it's been around for a few months at least. Bug reports from the unsupported packages in Ubuntu's latest release go to Malone, which is a part of Launchpad. Also, I think people have been using Rosetta to do translations for Hoary as well. It looks promising.

    Before you ask, Launchpad isn't open source. Yet. [ubuntulinux.org]

    • Re:Launchpad (Score:3, Insightful)

      by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 )
      The FAQ doesn't say why Rosetta isn't open source. I find this shocking because Ubuntu has traditionally maintained a strong stance in favor of free software. I don't suppose you'd happen to know why?
      • I have no clue. Canonical has to make money somehow, though, and I think commercial software developers would find something like this worthy of spending money on. My feeling is that other projects aren't going to want to use a closed source tool (and rightfully so), and I don't even know if there's an offer for other open source projects to use the Launchpad tools. As project internal to Ubuntu, however, it seems to be working pretty well. The barrier to entry for people to translate free software has been

      • Re:Launchpad (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The FAQ doesn't say why Rosetta isn't open source.

        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>

      • > The FAQ doesn't say *why* Rosetta isn't open source.

        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"...
      • Complaining about Rosetta / Launchpad's openness is like complaining about Google not releasing their code. Both provide services, while using OSS to provide the platform.

        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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Before you ask, Launchpad isn't open source. Yet.

      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)

        by SunFan ( 845761 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @02:10AM (#12404713)
        They are now propriatary software developers, and it is immoral to support ubunto because of it, unfortunatly.

        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)

          by Anonymous Coward
          "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."

          RMS would disagree with you.

          • 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)

          by Anonymous Coward
          It is entirely possible to argue against closed standards without using the morality card

          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
          • Ethics and Morals are indeed two different but related things.
            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:1, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            denying the world the source code is not nice and undermines the reason we allow copyright in the first place

            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)

              by Anonymous Coward
              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.

              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.
          • Sigh. I hate replying to ACs but here it goes.

            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)

          by Anonymous Coward
          The claim: "OSS licensing is merely a set of terms in a transaction."

          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

          • 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)

        by Mold ( 136317 )
        Immoral? No. Hypocritical? Maybe.
      • > red flag

        Oh, fitting subject.
      • "They are now propriatary software developers, and it is immoral to support ubunto because of it, unfortunatly."

        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.
      • > They are now propriatary software developers, and it is immoral to support ubunto because of it, unfortunatly.

        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 :-)
        • It's not as if Canonical sells Rosetta as a proprietary product. It's not a product *at all*; it's a service.

          Exactly. Like Google or Yahoo. Seen the code to either of those?

  • Differentiate...? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mph_az ( 880372 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @12:43AM (#12404331)
    I assume from the sumarry that this means finding a niche that puts them apart from netbsd's pkgsrc and the gentoo system...both of which already address tracking source updates across multiple distros (and even OSes -eg pkgsrc and gentoo on bsd).

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "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?"

      Well the mantra around here is "live off the support".

      • Re:Differentiate...?-GPL with Octane. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mabhatter654 ( 561290 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @01:53AM (#12404631)
        businesses will pay for a "gatekeeper" if they provide enough value. Red Hat's doing nicely, but it's still a seller/buyer thing.. not cooperation. You're still at Red Hat's mercy for the next "boxed" copy if you need something important fixed...or risk going "on your own" until the next version.

        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!

    • I'll assume that by differentiate they mean "take one of the power and move the power to the front".
    • This tool is at a different level to pkgsrc or emerge. Distribution developers (for example) sometimes apply patches to packages that have not yet been merged upstream. emerge has a way to fetch them at compile time, as does rpm and dpkg-build and I suppose BSD does too. This tool has nothing to do with that. What it *does* do is help them find the right patches to apply, perhaps borrowing them from another distribution.

      (Whether it is really a good idea for distributions to ship software that varies ve

  • Nifty. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by millennial ( 830897 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @12:48AM (#12404355) Journal
    Now if they make a similar project for the average end user that has the simplicity of Gentoo's emerge system, but is cross-platform, I'm sold.

  • difference between need and CVS, etc... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mabhatter654 ( 561290 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @01:24AM (#12404503)
    The reason Bitkeeper was choosen over all the others is that it allowed a developer to keep their own private version and others to share specific parts... which is the opposite of nearly every other source management system. Every other system seeks to have one "golden" version with developers contributing only to that... think corperate style software, always working toward some "release". Bitkeeper was the only one to allow individuals to keep their "pet" projects, but still share all the changes amongst themselves... i.e you could have Linus' version, Alan Cox version, etc... they can all "borrow back" from eachother, but don't Have to. it's percisely the opposite philosophy of every other source control system to conform everybody to "the way".


    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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There's just one problem to watch out for. That the needed communications between repositories doesn't outnumber the actual content behind it.
      • But as a business, you'd be generally syncing to either Ubuntu's repository or your corperate one.. and not much else. The bandwidth to sync half an iso a day is pocket change for most businesses compared to email/websurfing demands. Cannonical would do the developer-syncing part... that'd make them the money.. all a business would see is their own connection.

        Like somebody else questioned, the corperate benifit would be pooling the resources that allow the free version to operate... then your employees

    • > The reason Bitkeeper was choosen over all the others is that it allowed a developer to keep their own private version and others to share specific parts... which is the opposite of nearly every other source management system. Every other system seeks to have one "golden" version with developers contributing only to that... think corperate style software, always working toward some "release". Bitkeeper was the only one to allow individuals to keep their "pet" projects, but still share all the changes am

  • The Patron Saint of OSS. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02, 2005 @01:26AM (#12404515)

    Shuttleworth, who sold his company Thawte to RSA in 1999 in a transaction valued at $US575million, believes Ubuntu will be one of the main beneficiaries.


    and


    "I am fortunate in that I do not have to worry about short term risks," he says. "I am trying to look a little further down the pipeline than most companies can and I would rather be at the centre of the tightening web than on the fringes.


    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.
    • to take Ubuntu to the next level requires something "more" than just lots of hardworking people "pounding" code back into shape. The real draw of OSS is for commercial vendors seeking to get control of their businesses.. rather than being slaves to what ever MS/oracle/ etc wants this week.

      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!

  • SourceForge.net? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kerhop ( 652872 )
    I'm not a Linux developer, but isn't this just another SourceForge.net?

  • A File System for Linux (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LinuxSneaker ( 528349 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @01:48AM (#12404601)
    With all of the fallout with BitKeeper and the need for a Version Control System, has anyone looked at a new filesystem with would natively support this? Not only would software development be great with it, but back-ups would be a breeze.
    Could name it VCFS (Version Control File System)...has anyone used those letters before (amid the NTFS, NFS, SMB, VFAT file systems)?
    • Well done, you've just described VMS' [openvms.org] native filesystem.

      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
    • You're describing ClearCase [ibm.com]. And it's a horrific piece of garbage.

    • Re:A File System for Linux (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      VCFS (Veritas Clustered File System)
      http://veritas.com/Products/www?c=product&refId=20 9 [veritas.com]
      VCFS (Virtual CVS File System)
      http://vcfs.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

    • doesn't work well (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cahiha ( 873942 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @08:39AM (#12405910)
      That idea has been tried numerous times before and it doesn't work well. Most things do not need to be versioned, or versioning them is harmful to system performance. The things that do need to be versioned require a lot more functionality than a file system can provide on its own.

      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.
    • .. and it sucks very badly. While VC in a file system would be useful (ITS and VMS had it in the '70s), it's not a substitute for the discipline of manually checking in a group of files as a changeset tagged with a useful description of what it does.
  • rosetta translation tool is nice, go and try it.
    • It does work great. I know the Ubuntu doc team is using it to translate the various help guides and docs they are working on. It makes everything a whole lot easier

  • Launchpad's Rosetta (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tka ( 548076 )
    Will it result in inconsistant translations? I translated few of the item's and already noticed how somebody's translation differed from what I would've written. The Gnome finnish translation team does provide a dictionary for english > finnish ( http://www.gnome.fi/cgi-bin/sanakirja.cgi ) but will everybody translating from english to finnish use it? How about other languages? Who get's to decide which term to use in the actual release?
  • Distributed this and that is great. But a lot of projects are hosted on systems like sourceforge, they have their own tracking features. And most distributions also have their own trackers and what not.

    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)

    by Gilesx ( 525831 ) * on Monday May 02, 2005 @07:12AM (#12405588)
    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, 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.
    • How ironic...

      > 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?... :-) )
    • I'm not really sure why you're talking about Ubuntu. It's not like this new system comes from the distro (which consists of Canonical plus a whole lot of volunteers and users), it comes from Canonical.

      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. ;)
  • Canonical wants this: "As the framework [for using code from across the community] sets, hopefully we are at the centre of [open source]."

    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

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