Tagged a first version of the TWiki to FusionForge’s MediaWiki converter

As announced previously, I’ve been hacking on a migration tool allowing to import into the MediaWiki of a FusionForge project, a conversion of the contents of a TWiki wiki.

I’ve succesfully imported a first project (from PicoForge to FusionForge) using the tool, so I’ve decided to tag a first release and make the Git repo accessible.

More details at : https://fusionforge.int-evry.fr/projects/pytwiki2mediawi/

Feel free to ask here in the comments or by email, in case of need.

And, yes, my Python is most likely awful, but at least, this works, and much more featureful than existing tools I could test.

COCLICO started : many interesting development in forges ahead of us in the 2 coming years

We have started the COCLICO project this friday, with a meeting grouping many actors coming from various french regions, that operate in the area of open source forges (around FusionForge, NovaForge, Codendi, Trac, PicoForge, etc.). It’s a “Pôle de Compétitivité” (french R&D clusters) project which is funded by french public agencies, under the frame of both the FLOSS thematic group of System@tic (Paris) and Minalogic (Grenoble).

COCLICO will last 2 years and will let us all collaborate on producing FLOSS components that should allow much more interoperability between the open source forges, and probably deliver interesting standards that should allow to integrate forges with more tools in order to support new uses. We have no website yet, but it will be setup next week.

Of course a collaboration project with many companies (with various profiles, from the single consultant to the very large corporations) and academics is always requiring some effort so that everyone collaborates, but we have a strong focus on producing code as first steps, and I’m quite confident we all believe that FLOSS is necessary to share the innovation efforts.

I hope it will be a great occasion to bring interesting new things in the FLOSS ecosystem, and that we’ll manage to let others participate even if they are not funded by COCLICO, since one of the goals of the project is to bring momentum in the general forges ecosystem.

As far as we’re concerned at Institut TELECOM, we’re leading two workpackages on interoperability and community/ecosystem.

I’m very excited about this project, which together with our running Helios project should allow us to contribute in a significant way to FLOSS development tools and to the general quality of the FLOSS development process.

Expect more spamming from me about forges in the future on this blog 😉

Update : we now have a website both with more details in french (including a description of the project’s work-packages) and in english (still empty at the moment, working on it).

Switching from phpGroupware to eGroupware ?

We’re seriously considering switching from phpGroupware to eGroupware for some infrastructure needed for a picoforge-based platform that we need to deploy soon.

phpGroupware is unfortunately kinda dead these days, whereas eGroupware seems to have managed to keep some momentum.

Of course we had preferred keeping with phpGroupware when the two projects initially switched apart, in particular because the GNU project-linked QA/copyright policies were a guarantee that our contributions may be better protected in such a collaboration environment (we tried and help the phpGroupware as much as we could, btw, and parts of this history is told when looking at : http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/tag/phpgroupware/).

But the copyright policy is not all about successful collaboration, and it happens that phpGroupware fails to deliver from quite a few months now. Btw, I’m not so close to the project to tell exactly what’s happening and why, but looking at the mailing-lists, at least, the situation looks very bad.

So I dare say it lound : the phpGroupware project is quietly dying (at least from my point of view).

But as we need some improvements that were initially planned for its 0.9.18 release (filemanager, accounts, various stuff I’m not really qualified to list completely)… we need to consider what the options are…

And fortunately, it looks like eGroupware has not forked in a too much differing way, from a technical point of view, and that they have even improved some of the things we expected to be coming from phpGroupware 0.9.18.

So it’s very much likely that we’re going to try and switch to eGroupware for some parts of the platform to be deployed in the next month.

This may not concern the whole of the PicoForge infrastructure but only a particular project that builds on top of the current PicoForge infrastructure, with some variations.

As for the future of PicoForge as the libre software forge, it’s not really clear what’s gonna happen, but I think that we may be making a more radical switch some day, for instance by forgetting the old legacy PHP code, and so neither depending on phpGroupware nor eGroupware, but using some more modern tools/frameworks (and why not something like Tine 2.0 ? … no, but we may be inspired by some of its characteristics ;).

Qui vivra verra.

Conférence sur la contribution dans les projets libre à Brest le 15 février 2008

Je vais intervenir chez nos collègues de TELECOM Bretagne le 15 février 2008 pour parler de la
conduite d’un projet libre basé sur du logiciel libre.

Le teaser des organisateurs annonce :

Olivier, nous parlera plus spécifiquement du projet PicoForge, une
plateforme de développement collaboratif auquel il contribue. Nous lui
demanderons aussi d’aborder la question de la constitution et de
l’animation d’une communauté de développeurs et d’utilisateurs autour
d’un tel projet.

Cette conférence se tiendra dans le cadre de la filière de 3ième année
“Systèmes logiciels et réseaux” et est ouverte à tous.

Venez nombreux 😉

Update 2008/03/11 : les slides, sur slideshare :

Rencontre forgerons francophones au MEN suite à SL 2008

Suite à Solutions Linux, et à la première rencontre un peu informelle sur le stand de Bull, nous (participants à la liste forges@picolibre.int-evry.fr) avons pu nous réunir de façon plus posée et approfondie (sur une grosse matinée, et avec plus de gens), au Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale (merci à eux d’avoir prêté la salle), pour prolonger la dynamique de contacts autour des forges.

La réunion a permis d’aborder de nombreux sujets :

  • tour de table des présents et résumé des épisodes précédents (la liste, hephaistos, etc.). Présentations rapides des différentes forges représentées (GForge, Codex, NovaForge, LibreSource, PicoForge, etc.), et des différents utilisateurs ou prestataires
  • courte discussion sur la définition des “forges”, vs groupware, vs etc.
  • historique du projet GForge (par Roland Mas, Christian Bayle et le reste de la salle ;), et réflexions sur le processus de maintenance évolution du projet, la gouvernance, le devenir potentiel, etc.
  • présentations de contributions éventuelles possibles des participants au projet GForge, discussions sur l’interopérabilité
  • présentation par Olivier Abdoun, sur les forges “de nouvelle génération” reprenant des idées venant des projets QualiPSo et SCOrWare
  • différentes présentations des forges représentées (NovaForge, Codex, LibreSource)

Nous avons conclu en réfléchissant à l’avenir : collaborations entre présents, organisation de nouvelles rencontres (suite Hephaistos ?), élargissement à d’autres projets et à l’international.

Je pense que tous les participants sont repartis avec beaucoup d’enseignements, et la volonté de collaborer, notamment, à court terme, autour de contributions à GForge, et vers l’interopérabilité entre forges.