The state of distributed bug trackers

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Sun 10 November 2013}

A whopping 5 years ago, LWN ran a story about distributed bug trackers. This was during the early waves of distributed version control adoption, and so everybody was looking for other things that could benefit from decentralization.

TL;DR: Not much has changed since.

The potential benefits of a distributed bug tracker are similar to those of a distributed version control system: ability to fork any arbitrary project, easier collaboration between related projects and offline access to full project data.

The article discussed a number of systems, including Bugs Everywhere, ScmBug, DisTract, DITrack, ticgit and ditz. The conclusion of our favorite grumpy editor at the time was that all of the available distributed bug trackers were still in their infancy.

All of these piggyback on a version control system somehow - either by reusing the VCS database, by storing their data along with the source code in the tree, or by adding custom hooks that communicate with a central server.

Only ScmBug had been somewhat widely deployed at the time, but its homepage gives me a blank page now. Of the trackers reviewed by LWN, Bugs Everywhere is the only one that is still around and somewhat active today.

In the years since the article, a handful of new trackers have come along. Two new version control systems - Veracity and Fossil - come with the kitchen sink included and so feature a built-in bug tracker and wiki.

There is an extension for Mercurial called Artemis that stores issues in an .issues directory that is colocated with the Mercurial repository.

The other new tracker that I could find (though it has also not changed since 2009) is SD. It uses its own distributed database technology for storing bug data - called Prophet, and doesn’t rely on a VCS. One of the nice features is that it supports importing bugs from foreign trackers.

Some of these provide the benefits you would expect of a distributed bug tracker. Unfortunately, all those I’ve looked at fail to even provide the basic functionality I would want in a bug tracker. Moreso than with a version control system, regular users interact with a bug tracker. They report bugs, provide comments and feedback on fixes. All of the systems I tried make these actions a lot harder than with your average bugzilla or mantis instance - they provide a limited web UI or no web interface at all.

Update: LWN later also published articles on SD and on Fossil. Other interesting links are Eric Sink’s article on distributed bug tracking (Erik works at Sourcegear who develop Veracity) and the dist-bugs mailing list.

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Quantified Self

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Sun 10 November 2013}

Dear lazyweb,

I’ve been reading about what the rest of the world seems to be calling “quantified self”. In essence, it is tracking of personal data like activity, usually with the goal of data-driven decision making. Or to take a less abstract common example: counting the number of steps you take each day to motivate yourself to take more. I wish it’d been given a less annoying woolly name but this one seems to have stuck.

There are a couple of interesting devices available that track sleep, activity and overall health. Probably best known are the FitBit and the jazzed-up armband pedometers like the Jawbone UP and the Nike Fuelband. Unfortunately all existing devices seem to integrate with cloud services somehow, rather than giving the user direct access to their data. Apart from the usual privacy concerns, this means that it is hard to do your own data crunching or create a dashboard that contains data from multiple sources.

Has anybody found any devices that don’t integrate with the cloud and just provide raw data access?

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Porcelain in Dulwich

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Fri 04 October 2013}

“porcelain” is the term that is usually used in the Git world to refer to the user-facing parts. This is opposed to the lower layers: the plumbing.

For a long time, I have resisted the idea of including a porcelain layer in Dulwich. The main reason for this is that I don’t consider Dulwich a full reimplementation of Git in Python. Rather, it’s a library that Python tools can use to interact with local or remote Git repositories, without any extra dependencies.

dulwich has always shipped a ‘dulwich’ binary, but that’s never been more than a basic test tool - never a proper tool for end users. It was a mistake to install it by default.

I don’t think there’s a point in providing a dulwich command-line tool that has the same behaviour as the C Git binary. It would just be slower and less mature. I haven’t come across any situation where it didn’t make sense to just directly use the plumbing.

However, Python programmers using Dulwich seem to think of Git operations in terms of porcelain rather than plumbing. Several convenience wrappers for Dulwich have sprung up, but none of them is very complete. So rather than relying on external modules, I’ve added a “porcelain” module to Dulwich in the porcelain branch, which provides a porcelain-like Python API for Git.

At the moment, it just implements a handful of commands but that should improve over the next few releases:

from dulwich import porcelain

r = porcelain.init("/path/to/repo")
porcelain.commit(r, "Create a commit")
porcelain.log(r)

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Book Review: Bazaar Version Control

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Sat 28 September 2013}

Packt recently published a book on Version Control using Bazaar written by Janos Gyerik. I was curious what the book was like, and they kindly provided me with a digital copy.

The book is split into roughly five sections: an introduction to version control using Bazaar’s main commands, an overview of the available workflows, some chapters on the available extensions and integration, some more advanced topics and finally, a quick introduction to programming using bzrlib.

It is assumed the reader has no pre-existing knowledge about version control systems. The first chapters introduce the reader to the concept of revision history, branching and merging and finally collaboration. All concepts are first discussed in theory, and then demonstrated using the Bazaar command-line UI and the bzr-explorer tool. The book follows roughly the same track as the official documentation, but it is more extensive and has more fancy drawings of revision graphs.

The middle section of the book discusses the modes in which Bazaar can be used - centralized or decentralized - as well as the various ways in which code can be landed in the main branch (“workflows”). The selection of workflows in the book is roughly the same as those in the official Bazaar documentation. The author briefly touches on a number of other software engineering topics such as code reviews, code formatting and automated testing, though not sufficiently to make it useful for people who are unfamiliar with these techniques. Both the official documentation and the book complicate things unnecessarily by listing every possible option.

The next chapter is a basic howto on the use of Bazaar with various hosting solutions, such as Launchpad, Redmine and Trac.

The Advanced Features chapter covers a wide range of obscure and less obscure features in Bazaar: uncommit, shelves, re-using working trees, lightweight checkouts, stacked branches, signing revisions and using e-mail hooks.

The chapter on foreign version control system integration is a more extensive version of the public docs. It has some factual inaccuracies; in particular, it recommends the installation of a 2 year old buggy version of bzr-git.

The last chapter provides quite a good introduction to the Bazaar APIs and plugin writing. It is a fair bit better than what is available publically.

Overall, it’s not a bad book but also not a huge step forward from the official documentation. I might recommend it to people who are interested in learning Bazaar and who do not have any experience with version control yet. Those who are already familiar with Bazaar or another version control system will not find much new.

The book misses an opportunity by following the official documentation so closely. It has the same omissions and the same overemphasis on describing every possible feature. I had hoped to read more about Bazaar’s data model, its file format and some of the common problems, such as parallel imports, format hell and slowness.

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Migrating packaging from Bazaar to Git

meta = {'category': debian, 'date': Sun 02 June 2013}

A while ago I migrated most of my packages from Bazaar to Git. The rest of the world has decided to use Git for version control, and I don’t have enough reason to stubbornly stick with Bazaar and make it harder for myself to collaborate with others.

So I’m moving away from a workflow I know and have polished over the last few years - including the various bzr plugins and other tools involved. Trying to do the same thing using git is frustrating and time-consuming, but I’m sure that will improve with time. In particular, I haven’t found a good way to merge in a new upstream release (from a tarball) while referencing the relevant upstream commits, like bzr merge-upstream can. Is there a good way to do this? What helper tools can you recommend for maintaining a Debian package in git?

Having been upstream for bzr-git earlier, I used its git-remote-bzr implementation to do the conversions of the commits and tags:

% git clone bzr::/path/to/bzr/foo.bzr /path/to/git/foo.git

One of my last contributions to bzr-git was a bzr git-push-pristine-tar-deltas subcommand, which will export all bzr-builddeb-style pristine-tar metadata to a pristine-tar branch in a Git repository that can be used by pristine-tar directly or through something like git-buildpackage.

Once you have created a git clone of your bzr branch, it should be a matter of running bzr git-push-pristine-tar-deltas with the target git repository and the Debian package name:

% cd /path/to/bzr/foo.bzr
% bzr git-push-pristine-tar-deltas /path/to/git/foo.git foo
% cd /path/to/git/foo.git foo
% git branch
*  master
   pristine-tar

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Kiln using Dulwich

meta = {'category': foss, 'date': Thu 21 March 2013}

http://blog.fogcreek.com/kiln-harmony-internals-the-basics/

Nice to see that #Kiln is also using #Dulwich for some of its Git support. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to spend as much time on it recently as it deserves (busy changing jobs and countries), but hopefully that will change soon.

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OpenChange 2.0 released

meta = {'category': openchange, 'date': Fri 08 February 2013}

Apparently ‘tis the season for major software releases.

Julien has just announced the release of OpenChange 2.0, codenamed quadrant. This release fixes a number of important bugs and enables integration with SOGo.

With the SOGo backend, it is now possible to set up an Exchange-compatible groupware server that can be accessed from Outlook without the need to connect any connectors.

See the release notes for more details.

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Bazaar: A retrospective

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Wed 19 December 2012}

For the last 7 years I’ve been involved in the Bazaar project. Since I am slowly stepping down, I recently wrote a retrospective on the project as I experienced it for the last 7 years.

Thanks to a few kind people for proofreading earlier drafts; if you spot any errors, please let me know in the comments.

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Samba 4.0.0, finally

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Tue 11 December 2012}

This afternoon we released version 4.0.0 of Samba. This is a significant milestone, and I’m very proud of the result. Samba 4 is the first version that can be a domain controller in an Active Directory domain.

We embarked on this journey almost a decade ago - the first commit is from August 2003. It’s been a long and bumpy ride. I hardly recognize the people in this team photo from 2003 (I’m second from the left).

A lot has happened in that time. We wrote a few million lines of code. We migrated from CVS to Subversion to Git. We’ve drifted apart and grown back together as a team.

In my youthful naivity I predicted a release “within 1 or 2 years” during a talk at the NLUUG in 2004. But Active Directory was a lot harder than we thought, and there were quite a few other distractions as well. I’m glad this release, which is by far the biggest and longest running software project I have ever worked on, has finally happened.

Some older RCs of Samba 4 have already been packaged for Debian and Ubuntu, in the samba4 source package. For Debian jessie, these will be integrated into the main samba source package. Please use experimental if you do want to try the existing packages, as it is most up to date.

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Documentation

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Sat 01 December 2012}

From LWN’s weekly edition:

Documentation is the sort of thing that will never be great unless someone from outside contributes it (since the developers can never remember which parts are hard to understand).

—Avery Pennarun

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Back to blogging

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Mon 26 November 2012}

Hello Internet. After a long silence and several fights with Serendipity I am back.

The contents from my old Serendipity install have been migrated to restructuredText in pelican. Among other things, this means I can now get rid of the last PHP install I had left on my server.

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Last day at Canonical

meta = {'category': misc, 'date': Wed 17 October 2012}

This Friday will be my last day at Canonical.

It has been a lot of fun working here. There is so much I have learned in the last three years. I’m going to miss my colleagues.

Over the last couple of months I have slowly stepped down from my involvement in Bazaar and the Bazaar packaging in Debian and Ubuntu. I would like to stay involved in Ubuntu, but we will see how that goes.

I’m taking some time off until the end of the year to see the world and hack, before starting something new in February.

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Summer of Code 2011

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Mon 18 July 2011}

The Samba team is once again participating in the Summer of Code this year. This year we have 4 students working on various projects related to Samba.

This year I am mentoring Dhananjay Sathe, who is improving the GTK+ frontends for Samba. In particular, he is making it possible to manage shares and users of a remote Samba or Windows machine.

Dhananjay is also blogging about his progress.

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libapache2-mod-bzr

meta = {'category': bazaar, 'date': Sun 02 January 2011}

During the last two days I hacked together a Bazaar module for Apache. This module makes it possible to easily enable the Bazaar smart server for Bazaar branches. It also can display a simple placeholder page for Bazaar branches without working tree. It’s surprisingly easy to write Apache modules.

The main advantage this has over a mod_wsgi / mod_python / mod_fcgi setup is that it doesn’t require any additional Python hacking on the users side or other configuration outside of Apache, and it doesn’t require configuration for each single branch in the Apache configuration. In the future I’d also like to support the settings “BazaarFrontend Wikkid” and “BazaarFrontend Loggerhead“.

The configuration is currently as simple as:

1
2
3

LoadModule bzr_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_bzr.so
BazaarSmart on
BazaarFrontend Basic

in your apache2.conf. The BazaarSmart and BazaarFrontend directives can appear in <Directory> or <Location> clauses as well, if you’d like to have different behaviour for different directories.

At the moment this project is a proof of concept, and probably not something you would want to run in production. For example, there is no way to limit the access to a branch to read only. I need to double-check there are no threading issues.

Testing and patches are welcome. The project is hosted here:

• https://launchpad.net/apache-bzr

Currently Playing: Stream of Passion - Calliopeia

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On the way to Samba 4: Part 2

meta = {'category': samba, 'date': Sun 02 January 2011}

It’s been more than a month since the last status update on my Samba 4 work - much more than the two weeks I promised.

During the holidays I finally managed to release the new alpha of Samba 4, as well as releases of some of our companion libraries (tdb, talloc, tevent and ldb). The release includes a significant amount of bug fixes and a lot of work towards a properly functioning Active Directory DC, too much to list here.

This release I’ve mainly been involved in improving our Python bindings and our handling of internal and external libraries. We now use symbol versioning for our copy of Heimdal Kerberos as well as some of our other libraries. Hopefully this will fix some of the issues users of the evolution-mapi plugin have been seeing where they end up with both MIT Kerberos and Heimdal Kerberos loaded into the same process (with all the consequences of overlapping symbol names). Samba 4 now also has the ability to work with the system Heimdal rather than using the bundled copy. I have packaged alpha14 for Debian and Ubuntu (fixing most of the open bugs against the Samba 4 package in the BTS), but am currently waiting for the new release of ldb to pass through NEW before I can upload.

The next release is scheduled for the first week of February.

Currently Playing: Stream of Passion - Haunted

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