I'm happy to say that for the last 2 months I've been spending some of my spare time working on MachDB again. Before I started coding again, I wanted to get an SCM selected and set up, and an issue tracker of some type. Initially I had planned on going with Subversion and Bugzilla, but after some convincing from Andreas Unterkircher, I decided to go with Redmine instead of Bugzilla. Took me some time to get it all set up, but we now have both source control and Issue Tracking/Project Management. It's really nice, I may have to make a case for this at work too. It has RSS feeds for everything, so you should be able to use it to keep up to date on all aspects of the project.

http://tools.unmx.com/redmine/projects/show/machdb

Please use this going forward for opening bug reports, feature requests, support questions, submitting patches, etc.

I'm also happy to announce that I have been fixing bugs and have released MachDB 0.5.2 tonight. I fixed the long standing package insertion bug, which I know a particular co-worker of mine will be very happy about. Go get the release.

You can also see my project roadmap here, release dates, features and bugs listed for each

Feel free to contact me, I like to know who's using MachDB and what improvements you'd like to see. And as always, I appreciate feedback of any kind.

I've been seeing a lot of interest in the project lately. I hear there was discussion of MachDB on a Ruby mailing list. That's great! I have had a lot of work and side projects over the last year that have taken me away from development on MachDB, but I want to assure the user community that it's not forgotten. I've had a number of good bug fixes submitted by users, and a few awesome contribs by a few people (thanks Andreas!). SVN and RedMine are getting set up now and all these patches will be rolled in.

Short term road map:

• SVN
• RedMine
• Mailing List
  
• Bug Fixes
• A few new Self-Checks for the host scripts
• Some of Andreas's Changes

Mid-Term:

• Tags
• Custom XML

Long Term:

• Web Services API
• CLI Client
  

Any questions, just hit me up. Thanks everyone for the support and the nice emails.

It's been a while since I last posted to this dev blog..not a lot of activity in the last year. As LISA 08 has approached, I've had a renewed inspiration in MachDB and am excited to be working on it again. I'm at the LISA conference Wed, Thurs & Friday if anyone would like to meet up and discuss the future of the MachDB, features you'd like to see or gripes/complaints. Hit me up on the blog and we'll find a way to meet up!

I'll be at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Fran this week, Wed-Friday. Hit me up if you're there and want to talk MachDB or just get a beer!

I've been busy philosophizing with others about the future direction of the MachDB. I have some code to write and some cool new features coming soon. I'll post more after the conference is over.

We now have some more project features, courtesy of the nice people at freshmeat.net and SourceForge.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/machdb/

and

https://sourceforge.net/projects/machdb/

I'm not using a lot of the features at SourceForge, but the bug and feature tracking systems will come in handy...if I can get people to use it. As for Freshmeat, I'll use that to get info out to the community.

In the interest of education, I have been working on docs. I started off with a data flow diagram, available in PDF and JPG form.

I put out a new version tonight of the code and a slightly updated XML spec. The following bugs and issues have been addressed:

• Filesystem and disks have had the limit raised from 2TB to 16 zettabytes.
• OS Name limit now 100 characters
• Added Base Architecuture to host node
• Added Unified Cache to CPU node
• Split up 'version' and 'release' into 2 different fields for packages. 'release' is optional input
  
• Various UI bug fixes
• Renamed files, added contrib directory, in an attempt to standardize

To update your DB scheme, please run the following:

mysql -u mysqluser -p mysqldatabse < update_0.5.0-0.5.1.sql

To update the data in your tables and your schema at the same time:

php update_0.5.0-0.5.1.php

This will update your packages table to include release information. If you don't want this, comment it out. If you do, you'll want to check your gathering scripts to make sure they also sent the release information properly.

I also added some contributed gathering script files. We now have them for PPC Linux, Sparc Solaris and Debian i386. Thanks to Chris and Kyrre for those contributions!