13.7.1. Travail en groupe : groupware
Groupware tools tend to be relatively complex to maintain because they aggregate multiple tools and have requirements that are not always easy to reconcile in the context of an integrated distribution. Thus there is a long list of groupware packages that were once available in Debian but have been dropped for lack of maintainers or incompatibility with other (newer) software in Debian. This has been the case with PHPGroupware, eGroupware, and Kolab.
All is not lost though. Many of the features traditionally provided by “groupware” software are increasingly integrated into “standard” software. This is reducing the requirement for specific, specialized groupware software. On the other hand, this usually requires a specific server. Citadel (in the citadel-suite package), Sogo (in the sogo package) and Kopano (in the kopano-core package) are alternatives that are available in Debian Buster.
13.7.2. Travail collaboratif avec FusionForge
FusionForge est un outil de développement collaboratif. Historiquement, il dérive de SourceForge, service d'hébergement en ligne de projets logiciels libres. Il en garde l'approche, basée sur le mode de développement du logiciel libre, et a continué à évoluer après que le code de SourceForge a été rendu propriétaire (les détenteurs des droits — VA Software — ont décidé de ne plus le diffuser sous une licence libre). Il fournit donc également quelques fonctionnalités mieux adaptées à un mode de fonctionnement plus traditionnel, ainsi qu'à des activités qui ne relèvent pas du développement pur.
FusionForge est en réalité une agglomération d'un ensemble d'outils permettant de gérer, suivre et animer des projets. Ces outils relèvent de trois grandes catégories :
communication: web forums, mailing-list manager, and announcement system allowing a project to publish news
tracking: tools to track project progress and schedule tasks, to track bugs, feature requests, or any other kind of “ticket”, and to run surveys
partage : outil de centralisation des documentations pour un projet, mise à disposition de fichiers génériques, espace web dédié à chaque projet.
Since FusionForge largely targets development projects, it also integrates many tools such as CVS, Subversion, Git, Bazaar, Darcs, Mercurial and Arch for source control management (also called “configuration management” or “version control”). These programs keep a history of all the revisions of all tracked files (often source code files), with all the changes they go through, and they can merge modifications when several developers work simultaneously on the same part of a project.
Most of these tools can be accessed or even managed through a web interface, with a fine-grained permission system, and email notifications for some events.
FusionForge is not part of Debian Stable. It is a large software stack that is hard to maintain properly and benefits only few users who are usually expert enough to be able to backport the package from Debian Unstable.
