[dist-bugs] Hello!

[Jesse Vincent]

Hi All,

I'm Jesse Vincent. You may well have run across me in the context of  
RT (http://bestpractical.com/rt), a not-so-distributed issue tracking  
system, in the past.

Like everybody else, I've pining for some sort of replicated bug  
tracker for quite a while. Early on, I was fairly convinced that the  
right thing to do was to stick bugs in your version control system  
right along side the branch they tracked, though the more I thought  
about it, the more I became convinced that what's important is being  
able to sync between different bug tracker instances, no matter what  
system they're running or where they're hosted. A distributed bug  
tracker which can sync with itself but not with other bug tracking  
tools just isn't good enough.

As we've been building Prophet, our peer to peer database and SD (a  
peer to peer bugtracker on top of Prophet), we've been guided by the  
following possibly-contentious belief:

Distributed source control is all about being able to have many, many,  
possibly divergent branches of a project and being able to easily  
share changes.  Distributed databases, on the other hand, should be  
able to incorporate all changes from any peer and percolate toward  
eventual consistency. Bug tracking is really a database application,  
not a source control application and at it's heart it needs a  
different sort of backend than a VCS.

We've built Prophet to let you sync changes from between any pair of  
database replicas - no matter whether a replica is a native Prophet  
database or some other system with a translation layer on top of it.  
For SD, we've built a first pass of translation layers for RT and for  
Hiveminder.com, our Web 2.0 task tracking service.  As of last month,  
SD handles issues, comments and attachments.

The next couple of SD-related projects include building out  
translation layers (Foreign Replica definitions) for Debbugs, Trac and  
Bugzilla, along with SD commandline ergonomics improvements.

Prophet lives at http://code.bestpractical.com/project/Prophet
SD lives at http://code.bestpractical.com/project/SD

I gave a brief intro to Prophet at a conference in Tokyo last month  
and will be talking about it again at OSCON in a few weeks: http://www.slideshare.net/obrajesse/prophet-a-peer-to-peer-replicated-disconnected-database/

So, that's my somewhat sleep-deprived introductory rant.

Best,
Jesse