Mergeant 0.66-1

The latest version of mergeant, a GNOME GUI for database manipulation, has finally reached the Debian archives, closing all bugs which were open against the previous one. Thanks, Loïc, for the sponsorship. As a side note, this version of mergeant has got an implicit pointer conversion bug due to missing includes in two different files. This was my first chance to test the bug forwarding feature of the Bug Triaging and Forwarding Tool (my project in Google's Summer of Code 2007). It isn't as comprehensible as I would like due to limitations on bugzilla, but was pretty handy nevertheless.

September 7th

Last friday was a national holiday here on Brazil (independence day). Even though there were lots of problems (my car got damaged while in the parking lot during the week, our planned paths were closed due to independece parties two times, etc), this was a very cool day. I've joined some friends and have gone to Holambra, 135km away from São Paulo, to see the famous expoflora - an exposition of flowers. It's aways nice to pass some time with good friends, forgetting the boring daily routines. The exposition was very interesting. They had (of course) a lot of flowers, one of the coolest being the "rainbow roses" - roses with various colors. Maybe I'll get some photos up sometime... Besides the flowers, they also had some exhibitions of Netherlands traditions, and of old rural stuff. The only downside goes to the organization; sometimes it was hard to find the way on the place (and to the place also), there should have been a lot of extra signs around.

SoC Final Report

The Google Summer of Code coding period has ended earlier this week, so it seems to be a good time to stop and look what was done (and what wasn't). Let's start with an objective analysis, following the list of planned features: Advanced query of bugs on the Debian BTS In a 1-10 scale, I would give myself something like 6 or 7 here. bug-triage can query bugs by number, source package, package, maintainer and submitter. These parameters can be combined to make an query (reports must match all parameters) and more than one query may be added, subtracted and and'ed. A clearly missing feature is querying by usertag, support for it has been added on btsutils already and is just a question of adding a new input box on the query builder dialog (it should work if you enter the query manually in the bug-triage query line AFAICT). Show all the information related to a bug report bug-triage has a "goto" button which opens the bug in the user's preferred browser. Missing is the support to open the bug in a MUA, which I have promissed to Loïc. Send additional information to a bug report bug-triage has a "followup" button which opens the user's MUA with the right address. Maybe setting the subject would be nice... Manipulate the tags of a bug report I haven't had time to implement this at all. I've started it, the bugs have a context-sensitive menu which have each of the available tags as checkboxes on the right current status, but clicking on them does nothing currently. Search for similar bugs in upstream developer BTS This one would value something like 3 or 4 in a 1-10 scale. It searches upstream bugzillas by product and component, but doesn't do any cool trick like searching words in the bug subjects. The plus is that it does support KDE bugzilla, even though I haven't been brave enough to promisse it before SoC :P Forward a bug report to the upstream developer BTS There isn't really a good interface to report bugs programatically on GNOME bugzilla, which was disappointing. <rant>There is the bug-buddy xmlrpc(?) interface, but the developers say they will actively break anything using it, which I find very free-software-unlike.</rant>. The current bug-triage solution opens a browser with some of the fields filled. It would be nice to fill the full bug description, but its limited by the maximum size of an URL, so it fills only an introductory text (something like This bug was filled on Debian BTS #XXX) currently. Let's hope bugzilla 3 get on the GNOME world soon. Conclusions Unfortunately, this project hasn't evolved as much as I would like in the second half of the GSoC. As I said elsewhere, a lot of stuff has happened, some good, some bad, but on the end everything I hadn't been able to dedicate myself to anything I should. Even so, I think the project may be considered sucessful. Maybe the more interesting product of this project, at least currently, is still on python-btsutils. As I said in the middle-term report, it'll be integrated in the debian_bundle soon, and might be powering important stuff like the devscripts in the future. The bug-triage application has a lot to evolve yet, but is also an interesting tool IMHO. There are a lot of hurdles in the way to get different BTSes integrated, but the effort will for sure pay in the future. I plan to keep developing it (evon though keeping the GSoC pace is impossible) and am anxious to see the results ;) Finally, as I said before, one of the main things on GSoC for me was the potential to learn cool stuff. The best choice I've made during all of this was to use Python. Even though it's still a new language for me, and i still have to search embarassingly simple things in the tutorial/reference, it was a lot more productive than if I was developing in C. Learning to use git was also a great. This goal was the more fulfilled one, I've really learnt a lot of things which will surely be useful in the future. BTOH, I still can't get used to glade :/

Final SoC releases

I've just finished releasing new versions of all modules related to my Summer of Code project, the Bug Triage and Forward Tool. If my mentor doesn't find any serious bug, these will be the last releases under the SoC flag. Thanks again, Google, for this great program and the progress it brings to Free Software. The releases: bzutils 0.2:

• Announcement
• Source .tar.gz

btsutils 0.3:

• Announcement
• Source .tar.gz

bug-triage 0.2.2:

• Announcement
• Source .tar.gz

Debian packages should hit the archive as soon as they get evaluated and sponsored. Of course, a full status report will also be posted during the evaluation time.