01.17.08

Changes in the Evolutionary Bandit Project

Posted in Identity at 11:29 pm by dale

The Bandit project, like many open source projects, does not have seek to produce only one release of an application or service. Its goal is to build a number of open source identity system components that are useful in enterprise environments. In pursuit of that goal, the project has evolved and will continue to evolve.

A small change in perspective…

Sometimes it evolves in small ways. You may have noticed a change in the attire of Bandit (the dog in our logo). Bandit used to look like this:

Now he sports are really cool cape like this:

Perhaps he used to be just some kind of terrier mutt, but now he’s a superhero. Or maybe he always was a superhero, and the mutt is his alter ego. I don’t really know if there is a marketing story line about saving the world to go with the logos, but I’d be happy if he could just make digital identity services a little better for humans. I’d even be happy if he could help get my passwords down to less than 10 while increasing the flexibility, security, and usefulness of my online interactions. It could just happen. In fact, it is happening. So I like the cape and the superhero look.

A bigger change in Bandit community sites…

A significant change in the project collaboration system is also in progress. We have been moving some of the Bandit Project support services from the Novell Forge site to our own servers. Axel recently came across some of the reasons for the change, as well as some brokenness in the main Bandit web site that was due to links that had not been updated since the change.

Moving to our own servers will allow us to use our own code to support the collaboration and development of Bandit components. The two most significant new sites are Bandit Cards and Bandit Code.

The Bandit Cards identity provider site was introduced last Fall. It is a source of identity and information cards for the Bandit collaboration sites. Bandit Cards is the hub of the bandit community and collaboration services. Of course, we want people to collaborate with us with their own identity sources and systems such as information cards and OpenID, but we do like to eat our own dogfood — so we will also use our own identity provider. Besides providing user account management and issuing information cards, the Cards site will also host some sample card-enabled services such as the sites to get project related podcasts, and, of course, register to win the famous Bandit t-shirts.

For developers, the new Bandit Code server is a more useful. It will support many of the developer tools such as a Trac instance for project management, the subversion repository, mailing lists and archives. The services on Code include bug tracking, roadmap, and a developer wiki. These all come courtesy of a Trac instance — but with one new Bandit component from Duane Buss (to whom I would link if he had a blog): a python information card plugin. The subversion repository has been moved to the same server and is integrated with the Trac system. We don’t have information card access to the subversion repository, yet, but it’s coming. In the meantime, accounts from the Bandit Cards server control access to the source code repository.

The developer wiki and project roadmap are undergoing fairly heavy changes these past few weeks, but you can find pointers to the new Bandit mailing lists, subversion repository, and bug tracking systems on the developer landing page.

A number of pieces of our project transition are still incomplete. Most notable is that the main wiki site at www.bandit-project.org has only recently started to reflect the underlying changes, and the links to the new mailing lists were out of date, as Axel discovered. Cleaning up the wiki at www.bandit-project.org will be the next step.

In the meantime, please go to Bandit Code site to get developer information, enter bug reports, use information cards, and get Bandit source code.

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