Contributors Portal Project

• 1 Motivation
• 2 Outline
• 3 Workflow description
  • 3.1 Big picture
  • 3.2 Repository System
  • 3.3 Maintainers workflow in integrating patches
• 4 Relevant tools
  • 4.1 Packaging tools
  • 4.2 Issue tracking
  • 4.3 Testing
  • 4.4 Modeling
  • 4.5 Metrics
• 5 Synergies
• 6 Action plan for a "Mandriva Forge"
• 7 Various Links
  • 7.1 "Improving The Software Distribution and Deployment Process"
  • 7.2 The Software Dock

The contributors portal project consists in:

• Providing a centralized information access point about the contributions to the Mandriva Linux project: code contributions, translations, documentation, testing contributions
• Specifying a formal contribution workflow and implementing the workflow within the portal itself

Motivation

• Streamline Mandriva relationship with the contributors community
• Help this community grow efficiently
• Have metrics on the projects
• Automate as many tasks as possible in the workflow
• Ease the discovery of synergies between projects and people
• Have an articulate discourse on the decision making process related to contributions acceptance/rejection

Outline

The portal will provide integrated access to following tools

• Real-time statistics on what's going on in the system
• Bug tracking system
• Testing system - Testzilla
• Project management
• Continuous specification of software
• Advanced knowledge base
• Global view of the partakers
• SVN and CVS web access
• Advanced monitoring system to keep track of changes

The portal will also implement a workflow system for automating most of the tasks that can be automated.

The portal will have both a web and a rich client interface. See for instance http://www.deskzilla.com for browsing a Bugzilla database. The rich client will be built upon Eclipse Rich Client Platform, possibly also on top of KDE, GNOME and XUL frameworks.

The portal should ease the contributors work in presenting the status, the requirements, the metrics and the resources related to each project in an homogeneous manner. A common project template will be used to summarize all relevant contribution resources.

Relevant sites

Community	Tool
NovellForge	Xoops + GForge
Go-mono	Mediawiki
ObjectWeb	GForge + JSPWiki
OpenOffice	Collabnet

• http://db.debian.org
• Launchpad https://launchpad.net/

Candidate tools for serving as (i) portal front-end, (ii) content management system, (iii) access rights system, (iv) searching infrastructure, (v) workflow base system

Software	URL
XWiki	http://www.xwiki.org
Trac	http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/
TWiki	http://www.twiki.org
Xoops	http://www.xoops.org
Mediawiki	http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/

Workflow description

Big picture

Schema by Marc.

Repository System

• http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RepositorySystemQuickstart
• http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RepositorySystem
• http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RepositorySystemSubmitting

Maintainers workflow in integrating patches

See msg by Fred Crozat sent to maintainers ML on how we could improve maintainer workflow concerning patches integration.

Relevant tools

Packaging tools

Issue tracking

• Jira
• Trac
• Bugzilla

Testing

• http://fitnesse.org/

See also http://opensourcetesting.org/testmgt.php

Modeling

Metrics

Synergies

• EDOS Research project http://www.edos-project.org
• Ryerson University research dept on tools for software engineering distributed teams

Action plan for a "Mandriva Forge"

Task	Date
Specification of the portal	December 2005
Architecture design, and plugin system in place	March 2006

Various Links

"Improving The Software Distribution and Deployment Process"

URL: http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/720/

"This essay essentially suggests the application of workflow automation and knowledge management disciplines to the software development-deployment-distribution process."

"Currently, the interaction between these collaborators is ad hoc, carried out via email, FTP, CVS, newsgroups, and Web sites such as freshmeat and SourceForge.

This ad hoc process is both a symptom of, and reinforces, some of the unwanted features of existing software development practices."

The Software Dock

URL: http://serl.cs.colorado.edu/~serl/cm/dock.html