[Ubuntu-ch] Technical question

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi Christopher,

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 15:18, Christopher Dickinson
<christopher.dickinson at edu.hefr.ch> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I was wondering if I could ask you, Swiss Ubuntu Team, the  a question,
> if in the case of Ubuntu development, diagrams (such as class diagrams,
> sequence diagrams, use case diagrams, etc) are used. We are a class of
> IT students at the Ecole d'Ingénieurs in Fribourg, CH, and we were
> wondering why we've never come across UML diagrams for open source,
> community developed software...
>
> Can you answer this question or perhaps point me in the direction of
> someone who could instruct me on this matter?

Well, I don't know if the Canonical engineers use UML, but Ubuntu is
first of all a Linux distribution, not so much a developing group.
Development is happening at a much bigger scale in KDE and Gnome,
where you have hundreds of Free Software projects.

Personally I never used UML in a practical surrounding, and, besides
it's graphical display of source code, I am not sure it is really
suitable for big projects anyway. In Amarok we use git for the
distributed development, the developers use either command line
editors like vim or IDEs like KDevelop or QtCreator.

Visualizing existing project code with UML tools is not that easy,
since there are not many tools around that allow an automatic
analysis. We tried several tools for that, Umbrello [1] for example
not being useful since you have actually to fit in everything by hand.
So it only really makes sense if you actually start your development
using such a tool from the very beginning.

You might have a look at Moose [2], that shows promising ideas, but
it's totally inconsistent in it's GUI, mixing proprietary icons with
free software elements, which is an overall dangerous approach and I
wouldn't touch that without a fear of getting into trouble with the
authors of the proprietary stuff. It's apparently a very academic tool
but from my POV (and the Amarok developers who looked into it) it is
not really well done usability wise, certainly not in its current
shape. It comes over more like a proof of concept than a really usable
tool in practical software development. And since it is an academic
project, I very much fear that it will not evolve that much, unless
some developers really maintain it consistently over time and sort out
the licensing problems they will invariably run into.

Graphical representation of code is interesting, but it doesn't
replace good source browsing tools. Those range from ack-grep on the
command line to more complex queries in GUI tools. A nice example of a
free (as in free beer, not Free Software) tool for Open Source
developers is Fisheye [3]. We have a running Fisheye instance here if
you are interested in having a look: http://amarok.be/fisheye.


Hope this helps.


Regards, Myriam (who lives very close to Fribourg).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrello_UML_Modeller
[2] http://moose.unibe.ch/
[3] http://www.atlassian.com/software/fisheye/

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