PBXT moves to Launchpad

It's been a week or 2 and some of you may already have heard that PBXT has moved from Sourceforge to Lauchpad.net: https://launchpad.net/pbxt.

There are several very good reasons for the move, not the least of which is that MySQL has already moved to Launchpad, and Drizzle is there too. It simply makes sense for a storage engine like PBXT to be on the same platform.

And check this out, Stewart Smith has already ported PBXT to Drizzle. You will find the tree here: PBXT in Drizzle. I will be pulling Stewart's changes back into the PBXT tree. Creating new branches, merging branches and generally contributing to projects is easy on Launchpad.

Besides this, Launchpad has great tools for bug reporting, planning, Q&A and managing releases which we plan to use. In general, I find these tools are much better integrated than those on Sourceforge. For example it is easy to attach a branch which fixes a bug to the bug report.

Jay Pipes has written some excellent articles on getting started with Launchpad:

A Contributor's Guide to Launchpad.net - Part 1 - Getting Started

A Contributor's Guide to Launchpad.net - Part 2 - Code Management

As Jay explains, making a contribution is done in a few easy steps: create a branch, make your changes, push the branch back to Launchpad and request a merge into the project. That's it!

Give it a try, Vladimir and I will certainly be glad to have your help. :)

PBXT Beta Version Released!

I am pleased to announce that the Beta version of PBXT has just been released. You can download the source code of the storage engine from www.primebase.org/download. I have also updated the documentation for this version.

Configuring and building the engine is easier than ever now. To configure PBXT all you have to do is specify the path to the MySQL source code tree (after building MySQL), for example:

./configure --with-mysql=/home/foo/mysql/mysql-5.1.26-rc

The PBXT configure command will retrieve all required options from the MySQL build. For example whether to do a debug or optimized build and where to install the plugin are determined automatically, depending on how you configured MySQL.

This was a source of some mistakes when building the plugin, so I think it is really cool!

So what's next?

My goal is a RC (release candidate) version before the end of the year. Considering the stability of the new Beta, I think this is realistic.

The main work is testing, performance tuning, and fixing all those bugs you are about to find as you give PBXT a spin, right? :)

Besides, the size of the PBXT programming team will soon double! But more about that later...

Another thing I would love to do soon is a Drizzle version of PBXT. This has one significant advantage. If I discover a bottleneck in Drizzle, while performance tuning the engine, a patch for the problem in the server will probably be accepted fairly quickly.

But first I need to move PBXT to launchpad where all the music is playing these days!