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Ingres Open Engineering
From Ingres Community Wiki
Contents |
Welcome to Ingres Open Engineering
Welcome to the Ingres Open Engineering wiki. These pages on the Ingres community site are dedicated to helping build a community of software developers that want to work in collaboration with the permanent Ingres engineering staff to advance the Ingres technologies. Here you can find information and resources that will assist you in becoming an integrated member of the Ingres development team.
News and Announcements
| 31-jul-2008 | : | Soliciting requirements and analysis of available tools for an Ingres Community Engineering Portal. |
About Open Engineering
Open Engineering is the process of developing new versions of Ingres software in conjunction with the open source community. In Open Engineering, the open source developer community has the opportunity to become deeply vested and integrated into the permanent team of engineers that design, build, test and support Ingres products. From the initial conception of an idea through to its design and implementation, Open Engineering requires that we collaborate with the community on everything ranging from our high level requirements to detail design specification to coded implementations. This allows all aspects of our software engineering to be more thoroughly vetted by a larger number of eyes which in turn enhances our software's quality and reliability.
Open engineering embraces the idea that by collecting the ideas and talents of a diverse group of people, we can create new generations of our technologies that are not only more in line with the needs of our users but also are kept on the forefront of modern thought. Open engineering will allow Ingres Corp. to create solutions faster and deliver more meaningful software to a wider audience.
While Ingres Corp. has fully embraced the open source model, we have found that we are on the forefront of organizations that are embracing open engineering. We are in the process of defining some of our open engineering processes and as we do will make more information about the open engineering processes available to community members. The evolution to a fully open engineering process will not occur overnite. We encourage community members to get involved and give us your opinions, ideas and requirements.
Resources and Links
There are a number of resources available to the community that assist in open engineering. If you find additional resources, please add them here.
Mail Lists
There are several e-mail lists that exist for discussion around the Ingres Product Family.
There are a variety of mail lists that are available for community members who find browser-based forums inconvenient or awkward. Some of these are hosted at lists.ingres.com and others are available elsewhere. Some of the more pertinent have been listed below.
These lists are all available as ordinary e-mail discussion lists.
| List | Description |
|---|---|
| Help & info for Users | |
| Ingres Announcements | General Ingres Announcements |
| info-ingres | Unmoderated list for all users of Ingres and related products (also see comp.databases.ingres below) |
| comp.databases.ingres | For administrators and users of the Issues relating to Ingres products. |
| OpenROAD Mailing List | For OpenROAD developers, administrators and users. Subscribe • Archives |
| Engineering discussion | |
| Ingres Open Source Engineering | Discussions about the engineering processes needed to support a true open source community |
| Ingres Open Source Infrastructure | Discussions about the infrastructure needed to support a true open source community |
| Ingres Cafe | Discussion and accouncements concerning the Cafe, the integrated Ingres/Eclipse bundle |
| Ingres Compatibility Layer Review | Questions, enhancements, etc. around the Ingres Compatibility Layer |
| Ingres Developers | Discussions around Ingres OpenSource projects, DDS Reviews, etc. |
| IngresGIS community | Discussions and announcements concerning the IngresGIS GeoSpatial community |
| Ingres Open Source Drivers Integration Plans | IPs for opensource drivers |
| OpenROAD Community | Used to distribute news and announcements concerning developments in the OpenROAD open source community. |
| OpenROAD Developer | Supports discussions relating to OpenROAD open source projects. Open to OpenROAD Community Members who have taken the extra step of becoming an OpenROAD Community Developer (see Join the OpenROAD Community). |
| Subversion Commits | Commits to code.ingres.com. |
Additional Resources
Community Web Tools
There are a number of tools available to community developers. Visit this site often to find out what new is happening in the world of developer tools.
- Ingres Community Site (community.ingres.com) This is the home page for the Ingres Open Source Community
- Ingres Downloads (esd.ingres.com) This site provides electronic software delivery for all commercial and community editions of Ingres products.
- Ingres Code Browser (code.ingres.com) This site provides a browsable interface to the currently published Ingres source code.
- Ingres Community Bug Tracker (bugs.ingres.com) This site is used by some of the DBMS project to host wiki pages and perform bug tracking.
- Ingres Documentation (docs.ingres.com) This site provides on-line access to all Ingres product documentation.
- Ingres Community Forums This site provides end-user and developer forums.
More information on open engineering infrastucture can be found here.
Presentations and Webinars
- OpenROAD Meets Open Source (pdf) by David Tondreau given at the 2008 Ingres Global Partner Conference in Prague, Czech Republic.
- OpenROAD Community Process (pdf) by David Tondreau given at the 2008 Engineering Summit in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.
- Ingres Open Source Community (pdf) by Andrew Ross given as a VIP Webcast in March, 2008.
Open Engineering Processes
We are working on developing the processes for formally integrating community developers into the Ingres engineering process. Not only will this require us to define, document and publish those processes, but we must also develop the means to allow the community to collaborate effectively on a variety of new projects. This is a work in process that is tempered by our need to ensure that we continue to provide world-class support to our Enterprise customers. The entire engineering team is committed to open engineering but we ask the community to be patient and work with us as we evolve to this new model.
Community Code Management
There has been a very active discussion as to the best way to manage our code lines in the open source world. From a process perspective, the major issue that we face is that we need to ensure that customers who rely on Ingres products for production applications have closely managed code lines from which reliable and stable builds and patches can be created, tested and delivered to customers. This means that every change to the code for our commercial products needs to be thoroughly vetted and tested then cross-integrated into multiple code lines. At the same time, we want to encourage active participation and on-going contributions from community members. We need an environment that will allow developers to share code for projects in progress even if the design or implementation of the code is incomplete. To do this requires us to support multiple branches of our source. Managing these branches can become a very complex undertaking. A number of different models are being proposed and are available for public review and comment. A wiki page has been published which provides a graphical depiction of three different models which are under consideration. It is accessible here:
Ingres Engineers and Community Developers are encouraged to voice their opinions of these models on the Open Source Engineering mail list.
From a tools perspective, we use the Piccolo source management system internally to manage all Ingres code. Our development, support and Q/A procedures are currently tied closely to Piccolo functionality. Externally, we have provided access to some of our source code via a Subversion repository. There is an active discussion on whether or not to make the full jump to Subversion or another code management system, provide external access to Piccolo or embark on the efforts to coordinate changes between two source code repositories -- each of which would contain a version of the "truth." A wiki page has been published which provides a compilation of Subversion and Piccolo commands. It is accessible here:
Ingres Engineers and Community Developers are encouraged to voice their opinions of these models on the Open Source Infrastructure mail list.
Community Engineering Portal
We are actively developing a set of requirements for a community engineering portal that will allow both the Ingres enginnering team and community members to work seamlessly together on open source projects. As part of the requirements gathering process, we are looking at a number of tools on the market (both closed and open source) that could provide the functionality we are looking for.
More information on this effort can be found on the Ingres Community Engineering Portal page. Your input and analysis would be greatly appreciated. Ingres Engineers and Community Developers are encouraged to voice their opinions of these models on the Open Source Engineering mail list.
