This post is the first in a series of articles which serves to highlight the services of the Launchpad platform which hosts the MySQL Server, MySQL Forge, MySQL Sandbox and Drizzle Server projects. I will be walking you through the various pieces of the platform and provide examples of using each of the services. I will cover in depth the source code management services which all three projects now rely upon. The code management services are the critical piece of the development platform. In addition, I will show you how to use the Blueprints, Bugs, Answers and Translations services that many MySQL ecosystem projects, including the MySQL Sandbox and …

Looks like drizzle is announced now. I’ve spent a bit of time after work and on lunch breaks helping out here and there, and I’m excited about working on a database project again. Why am I working on the project? Average time from when I write a patch to when it goes into the tree has been measured in minutes, not in hours/days/weeks/months. Yes, I’m running the test suite first. Yes, I’m getting another person to review the code first. This is an example of how adding people to a project can slow it down, and how getting out of the way of the engineers can have amazing results. We set up bug tracker, code hosting, team organization, package build system, mailing list, IRC channel, and …

James Dixon has given the thumbs-up to my stretching his Bee Keeper analogy to explain open source development models (which is nice) and in doing so has suggested a new term to help quickly explain the difference between vendor- and community- dominated development projects.

The debate about the difference between the two approaches, and the language used to describe them, has been simmering for some time. For some background on it, and an explanation about why it matters, see Ted Ts’o’s …

There is some very big news going around that internet thing today: MySQL has switched from Bitkeeper to Bazaar. I wrote up a quick post on the Canonical blog about the same thing, and Giussepe Maxia has a nice technical post about how to get started working with the new system.

Here’s an excerpt from a mail I just sent to an internal Canonical list:

Bazaar and Launchpad are truly tools that matter, from a historical and social perspective. MySQL and other open source software run a huge percentage of the internet, and these tools preserve and enrich the body of knowledge that is in the public commons, knowledge that will be there for our …

And here we are, my second post in which I mention twitter, and wonder aloud what open source software projects should be doing with twitter. I don’t have any well-formed thoughts to foist on you, but I’ll tell you about an experiment I’ve been doing. Last week I started using summize.com to search for conversations about bzr. I did the same thing for ubuntu and for git, but only really stuck with the bzr stream. It’s been interesting to see what people are talking about, I’ve tried chiming in with suggestions when I can or asking for further details when people complain. I think what is so fascinating to me about this is that I’m finding a whole lot of conversations that aren’t at the level of a ranting blog post but are encouraging or thought-provoking feedback nonetheless.

I also registered twitter.com/bzr, but I’m not sure what to do with it yet. Suggestions? …