Presenting ALERT at OWF
Last week, as previously mentioned, we had an ALERT Project meeting in Paris, coupled with presenting ALERT at Open World Forum.
The meeting itself was productive and we got to see the unified ALERT interface for the first time. This is a single web interface that brings together all of ALERT’s functionality, so that you can search for a bug, see related information from the forum, wiki, mailing list and source code repository. The interface seemed responsive and generally well thought-out – we gave some feedback to help improve it further in the final version. I also had some interesting discussions with Jesus from Libresoft about integrating parts of ALERT in existing systems such as Bugzilla. If we can get this working then it would be possible to have a list of suggested duplicate bugs on every bug report in Bugzilla – very useful for issue triage and to quickly identify new bug reports. Of course, the useful information could be more than possible duplicates – pointers to related discussions elsewhere or the relevant areas in the source code, for example.
Part of Thursday and all of Friday was spent at the Open World Forum. We (Dario and I) gave a presentation on ALERT on Friday morning that gathered some interest (and some interesting questions) from those present. Overall, the conference was a bit strange – very corporate focussed, sponsored by Microsoft – but a worthwhile event nonetheless.
I’ve just spent parts of the last few days testing out the install process for the ALERT components. It’s a modular system, with different parts developed by different partners in different languages (you can even run it distributed across several machines) so the installation is a bit fiddly. However, work is in progess in producing a virtual machine with all components pre-installed, which will simplify deployment a lot. We’ll be starting trials among KDE’s Solid developers in the next few weeks (targetting the end of October, but it depends when all the software components are ready for testing).
As always, you can track progress on the ALERT website, by signing up to the newsletter or via Twitter @alertfp7.
