launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Olivier Berger <olivier.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi.

I'm new to the list and generally not very much aware of all details of
LP, so pardon me in advance for my ignorance, and sorry too in advance
for that long message.

I'd like to exchange with you about issues of bugtracker
interoperability. 

For the records, that's a subject we've been investigating in the Helios
project [0] for more than a year now, trying to work on means of
interlinking/navigation between bugs in different bugtrackers (and/or
forges' trackers) allover the FLOSS ecosystem.


We believe it would be very interesting for the whole Open Source
ecosystem to be able to offer standardized interfaces for accessing
bugtrackers used by the many Open Source projects, to enable large scale
applications in the QA process, and more integration between different
tools used in distributed contexts.


LP is already addressing some of the bug interlinking aspects, and we'd
like to pursue some of these ideas in a larger scale (inter project and
inter distros).

For example, bugtracker APIs, if available as REST for instance, could
provide standardized descriptions of bug "facts" (we propose the RDF
model for the shared/agreed semantics description, in the way shaped by
BAETLE project), so it would also be possible to use Bug's URLs as
identifiers on the Semantic Web / Linked Data web.


Having discussed that with many Open Source people and some LP experts,
I think it is probably a subject you'd be interested to discuss.


Anyway, after that long introduction, my first request would be to ask
some comments about possible existing APIs as candidates for more
standardization (I suppose LP already offers such potentially reusable
APIs), and the use of OSLC-CM V1 [2] as such a standard for bug tracker
APIs, possibly implemented by LP.

OSLC-CM is proposed by an industrial consortium (lead by IBM), that
seems quite interesting to us : in short, REST APIs, RDF as XML or JSON,
AJAX oriented protocol, open process, implemented soon by Mylyn, etc.


We've been working on implementing such an open source OSLC-CM V1 REST
API for PHP trackers like Mantis [3] and FusionForge's, using a
Zend-based REST server code.

The main interest we target would be interoperability with
tools like Mylyn, bts-link and others (bughugger, reportbug, bug-buddy,
etc.), and more generally any ALM tools. 

But ultimately, we dream of a more easy navigation between interlinked
bugs, much like what's in launchpad currently with links for bugs in
other distros/projects, but in the scale of the whole semantic web, that
would ease the work of QA people and maintainers/packagers (see a paper
we're publishing on the subject [4]).

For some more elements of context, you may have a hint of our past
efforts here : http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/?s=bug

Sorry again for that long message.

Looking forward to exchanging on the subject with you.

[0] : https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/
[1] : http://wiki.planetforge.org/index.php/Discussions_mailing_list
[2] : http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/CmSpecificationV1
[3] : http://www.mantisbt.org/bugs/view.php?id=11063
[4] : http://bit.ly/cWSkbx 

Best regards,

-- 
Olivier BERGER <olivier.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France)