Canonical Plans a Version-Tracking Tool for Devs

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.'"

Comments

Re:This doesn't really fix the problem.

[natrius]

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 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.

difference between need and CVS, etc...

[mabhatter654]

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!!