Hi Christopher, On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 15:18, Christopher Dickinson <[email protected]> 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/ -- Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE: http://www.fsfe.org Please don't send me proprietary file formats, use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300) -- Ubuntu-ch mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-ch
