BUI - Renaming to Scocca, wiki

As I mentioned earlier, there is already a project named BUI. The project has been renamed as Scocca. Scocca is Italian as pretty much means supporting structure, which this Scocca essentially is. The new project site can be found at https://launchpad.net/scocca . Renaming gave me a chance to migrate to Launchpad. Of course it's bit of a tradeoff.

Google Code and Launchpad have several important differences. Probably the main one for me was the version control system available. Google Code offers SVN while Launchpad offers bzr. SVN is a fine example of a centralized version control system. bzr is a distributed version control system. I have plenty of experience with distributed systems while I have not used distributed systems before. They offer certain advantages over centralized ones however.

The main advantage is that it is extremely simple to branch. This is extremely valuable in open source environment as it allows anyone to easily maintain his own branch of the application. Furthermore the changes can be merged back to the trunk version should that be desired.

The main disadvantage of distributed version control systems is that they are a relatively new phenomenon. This means that the tool support is weaker than in case of SVN for instance. Most of IDEs support SVN in a form or other. Finding an IDE that supports bzr is much harder task to handle.

Of course I still have plenty of things to learn about bzr (how to handle bugs etc. properly) but I believe it's a good time to bite the bullet now than later.

As Google Code, so does Launchpad offer code browser and an issue tracker. Furthermore Launchpad has specific support for blueprints, translations (gettext) and dynamic FAQ (answers). Interestingly it supports cross-project bug reports. This is an important feature for a library. Applications that happen to use it and have their project site at Launchpad can point bug reports dealing with the library directly to it.

Of course it's not all happy, happy, joy, joy. Google Code offers a really nice wiki. This is something that Launchpad does not support. Yet, anyway. Also while blueprints are nice as they allow the users and developers alike to specify features and discuss on them, the page describing the blueprint has to be placed on some external place (say, wiki again?). This is not a problem, just an annoyance. I opened a wiki for the project at http://scocca.wik.is/ .

For time being the idea is that the site will contain the descriptions of blueprints. There is not much information yet though. The motivation behind writing these blueprints is simple. It should be easy to transform these into real documentation. Furthermore they may help to see oversights in design (it's hard to see certain issues while you are delving in the code). And as a bonus the whole process becomes more transparent meaning that the ideas are not just in my head or in the code but in actual, readable documentation. :)

Note that I am not saying Google Code is bad and you should not use it. On the contrary. I think it is an excellent service you should take advantage of particularly if you don't mind using SVN and don't care about the specific infrastructure Launchpad provides.

If you want to get started with Launchpad, check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaunchpadStepByStepInstructions. It may seem a bit strange first with whoamis, push and pull but it actually slowly begins to make sense I hope. :)

My coding time has been severely limited by other duties. I hope to sketch out a style system (think CSS) during the weekend to the wiki and perhaps in code form too. The idea is that this system separates the width/height aspect out of the user interface structure definition. I think this clarifies the design a bit while the user has to provide one extra definition. At minimum the definition gives default style settings such as minimum widths and heights, background colors and such. In that way it will clean up configuration part as well.

There is plenty to do before I dare to release first public version but it's getting there each small step at a time. After all I need to have something to write for the next blog post at least. :)