I’m still not going to talk about my attack on the forge infrastructure problems quite yet; the software is coming along nicely, but I intend to announce only after it handles its fourth forge type (yes, that was a tease). But I will say this: I now think I know what the future of forges looks like. It’s called Roundup, and it is astonishingly elegant and potentially more powerful than anything out there. Anything, not excluding the clever decentralized systems like Fossil or Bugs Everywhere.
Here are the big wins:
1. Mailing lists, issue trackers, and online forums unify into *one* message queue that can be filtered in various ways.
2. Scriptable via XML-RPC or an email responder ‘bot.
3. Small base system with good extensibility – just three base classes (User. Msg, File) and the ability to define new classes. ‘Issue’ is a class built on top of these.
4. Arbitrary attributes per issue is basically free, with baked-in support for defining controlled vocabularies.
5. There’s a uniform way, called “designators”, for messages and other objects to refer to each other in text.
6. Small, clean implementation written in Python.
There are some things it needs, though… (Read the Roundup design document before continuing.)