My friend Adam Lincoln has been working on a Python implementation of Pal, with one key feature, Google Calendar support.

Finally, a companion to mutt for CLI people. The project is called pygpal, and it’s hosted on launchpad. It has some great features like seperate colors for each calendar, add/delete/edit of calendars, with full sync to Google Calendar.

This was a side project for Adam so he could play with the gcal python API. If it’s useful, please consider contributing to the project, specifically the “first run” experience needs some work. Feel free to branch it and run with the ball.

Dag Wieers has some comments about when bug tracking systems become fences instead of bridges. I wish it were so simple to solve this problem, but as Dag and the comments point out, it is more complicated than you would think. Some upstreams want every bug no matter how trivial, some want the distro to filter the bugs, some want NO bugs forwarded whatsoever(!), some want bugs in a mailing list instead of a bug tracker, and the list goes on and on and on. Not to mention that people ebb and flow out of projects so what one maintainer might want is not what a new maintainer might want.

For my part I default to not bugging the upstream unless I notice a large number of bugs that need to go somewhere. Unfortunately there’s been too many instances for me personally where trying to Do the Right Thing(tm) for bugs results in “I am upstream and I won’t fix your Ubuntu bugs”. But that’s ok, we’ve got most of the major projects handled and a personal relationship between the Ubuntu Developer and the upstream. I usually prefer handling this conversation with people face-to-face, for example when I go to GUADEC I make myself a little hitlist of maintainers that might have bugs in Launchpad that they’re not aware of.

There is a scalability problem here obviously, it can’t be just me, or the upstream author, it needs to be a team of people dedicated to this kind of thing. The upstream report has a column for “Upstream Contact”, which is ideally a person who has one foot in Ubuntu and one upstream. That person’s role will include being that “bridge” between upstream and the distro to make sure that bugs, patches, and everything else is moving smoothly back and forth. We discussed this at UDS and I will publish some notes soonish …

EDIT: Yep, alot of red in that upstream contacts column … I’ll be hitting that hard this cycle.