Governments. Governance. Customers wins. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Governments
The Examiner provided a two part interview with Daniel Risascher, Office of the CIO, Department of Defense, on open source at the DoD, while Government Technology Magazine reported on how open source software and cloud computing can save government money. Similarly, The UK Conservative party delivered a paper on the future of open standards, open source, SOA and cloud for UK Government, while it was reported that Vienna to …

There’s actually no single “correct” answer! It all depends on

1. where in a stack the component lives;
2. the state of the market for that component region;
3. sometimes even geographic location of the user comes into play.

Yes, for OSS projects modularity is handy in terms of handling contributions, but modularity may not be the best way to deal with a problem in a certain market state and situation!

Research has shown (see, for example, “The Innovator’s Solution” by Clayton Christensen) that the “integrated” region over time actually shifts to a subcomponent of an original integrated component that has since gone modular. An interesting example of this for MySQL its pluggable storage engine interface since version 5.1. MySQL is more modular now, but individual storage engines are tightly integrated for performance reasons, and in some cases they are even proprietary. …

Just a small tip for using Bazaar on OpenSolaris: set the BZR_SSH environment variable to openssh if you don't have the Python module Paramiko installed.
For example, in your ~/.bashrc:

export BZR_SSH=openssh

Could be useful if you're pulling MySQL stuff from Launchpad and use (Open)Solaris. Could also be useful on other Unix-like operating systems when the default is missing (Bazaar uses Paramiko as default).

Today at the Riga Sun Database Group Developer Meeting, I'm giving a MySQL University session about using Launchpad.net and Bazaar for Contributors. Below, I've posted links to the slides.

A Contributor's Guide to Launchpad and Bazaar   Open Office Impress slides
  PDF slides

Topics included in the slides:

• Getting started on Launchpad
• Various features of Launchpad
• Setting up a Bazaar repository
• Bazaar Commands
• Working in a decentralized gatekeeper model
• Linking to tasks through Launchpad
• Resolving merge conflicts using Meld

The article is an practical introduction to Bazaar's advanced features. After the basics, magnificently covered by Daniel Fischer a few weeks ago, this article explains how to perform high level development operations with Bazaar.
Bravo Guilhem! …

When Brian began the work on refactoring the MySQL 6.0 Server source code into what has now become the Drizzle Project, a number of code pieces were removed, including some major MySQL functionality such as stored procedures, server-side prepared statements, SQL Mode, some legacy code, and a variety of data types. The goal, of course, was to reduce the server code base down to a more streamlined and eventually modular kernel.

Of course, that vision is great, but it's got some side effects! One of those side effects is a dramatic reduction in the number of test cases that pass the test suite in their current form, and an increase in the number of tests that have been disabled. I re-enabled and fixed a few tests yesterday, but as of this writing, there are only 54 of 408 tests currently passing in the test suite.

…

Attention MySQL engineers and Drizzle contributors: upgrade to Bazaar 1.6.1 now to get some fairly massive performance speedups for bzr branch commands. As I noted in my last article on Launchpad code management, Bazaar 1.5 was having some performance issues when branching large project trees such as MySQL. In the article, I showed it was taking Bazaar 1.5 91 minutes to do the initial branch. With John Arbash Meinel's performance patches, the time to branch was cut down to 23 minutes, which is a fantastic improvement.

Ubuntu users: grab the 1.6.1 Bazaar package for your Ubuntu version from the Launchpad.net Bazaar Project Package Archive.

Mac OSX users:: grab the disk image here, with …

In writing my last article, I mentioned working with John Arbash Meinel, one of the lead developers of Bazaar, in attempting to diagnose and fix the performance bottlenecks apparent in using Bazaar with larger, history-rich projects like the MySQL Server. Well, after running some tests and building a custom branch of Bazaar that John pointed me to, I am happy to tell you that help is just around the corner. In my last article, you saw that doing a bzr branch lp:mysql-server took 91 minutes. This was a significant barrier to entry, I recognize. So, I think you'll be happy to see the results below, taken yesterday using John's patched-up Bazaar branch:

[529][jpipes@serialcoder: /home/jpipes/repos/mysql-server/5.1]$ time test_bzr …

In this second part of my Launchpad guidebook series, I'll be covering the code management and repository features of Launchpad.net. If you missed the first part of my series, go check it out and get established on Launchpad.net. Then pop back to this article to dive into the magic of http://code.launchpad.net. In this article, we'll cover the following aspects of the code management pieces of Launchpad:

• The Structure of Project Source Code on Launchpad.net
• Pulling Code into a Local Repository
• Creating a Local Working Branch for Bug Fixing
• Pushing Code to Launchpad
• Notifying a Merge Captain of Your Code Pushes
• Keeping Trunk Up To Date
• Merging Local Code with a Trunk …