Following suggestions by some other koha developers and with an increasing amount of silence from long-time koha community supporters liblime, we ve called an IRC meeting next Tuesday. We re concerned that our community is currently not sustainable: the withdrawal of any vendor could seriously damage the project. Moving some of the core project resources to a foundation should ensure its continued stewardship. From my own point of view, our co-op internally tries to keep its TruckNumber high and we d like to use a foundation to make sure the Koha project TruckNumber stays high. There are several groups set up for the koha project and some that existed before: can any of them help to make Koha sustainable? Right now, I think TTLLP is the only Koha hoster which isn t a private for-profit corporation. That seems a bit scary for a 10-year-old project. It s time to fix this. The agenda and information links are on the wiki. Hope to see everyone invoved in koha development there!

It s been a fairly good month working with Koha for me. Our co-op installed Koha 3.0 for a few more libraries and had quite a few enquiries. This means our test servers still need upgrading to 3.0.3, which is disappointing, but current customers come first. The flip side of that is that I m probably going to take some heat during tonight s koha General IRC Meeting and we re facing a bit of a rush to get the direct-RFID control feature and the category of patrons editor tidied and submitted before the 3.2 feature-freeze on 6 September. The features are currently sat up on our infamous co-op 3.0 fork branch, but at least I m currently working with that during a server migration at one library. Also announced this week, the eIFL-FOSS ILS project case studies include several Koha libraries.

Hi! I ve been away, but as you might have seen from identi.ca, I m back but busy. You may remember from posts such as Reject the Term Extension Directive and Improved Telecom Package Passed by EuroParl that MEPs can influence FOSS laws in many ways, because a lot of our copyright and patent laws are international now. Last time around, I compiled euroVote: copyright and patents but I ve not had time this year. Thankfully, others have summarised them. Mote Prime: Technology: Letter to MEPs on Software Patents Legislation summarises positions on the old swpat chestnut. European Parliament elections, the Green Party and free stuff By tom introduces the Green position. VOTE 2009: Spot the difference Lib Dem shocked and angered special: The Bristol Blogger shows me getting annoyed with the LibDems. If you re in the UK, you can look up your MEPs on the ORG EU Elections Site which looks pretty accurate to me. Anywhere in Europe, you can try to find some MEPs on the Free Software Pact country listing.

During this past weekend I tried to get Windows XP, Windows 7, OSX, Debian, and Ubuntu all on one machine. Due to some mishaps, driver oddities with Windows 7, and other things, I had to install certain operating systems multiple times. Now, the problem is, each operating system has it's own peculiar way of loading. Linux uses GRUB, Windows XP has NTLDR, 7 has the Windows Boot Manager, etc. Most of these operating systems also decide it would be helpful for the end-user that when his computer reboots, it can actually load the new OS. That's great, but I already have a bootloader.

I have a partition at /dev/sda5 which contains a GRUB installation. That's supposed to handle every OS's own method of booting, including the Linux installations which have their own GRUBs on their own partitions. But when you decide to overwrite the MBR, I don't get your nice and shiny OS. A good number of OSes use an MBR that won't boot an extended partition anyway. So instead of seeing your bright and shiny new OS, I see "NTLDR is missing". Or the ever-so-helpful "boot0: error". I'm -lucky- if I even get an OS at all, much less one that can load the grub shell so I can fix what you broke.

I understand having 3 GRUB installations plus a whole bunch of other bootloaders isn't exactly a standard use case. Most people don't go beyond dual-boot. But please, for the love of all that is holy, please just put a little checkmark somewhere,"Do not replace MBR". Ubuntu and Debian are the only OSes that actually give you that option in some form.

Or better yet, let's all just standardize on GRUB. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's as flexible as you can get.

These guys could do at least 10 minutes of research before writing an article. The AWS APIs are already 'open source', you're allowed to write free-software tools that use them. They're out in the open, with no NDA or anything attached. Eucalyptus also exists, which is a pretty darn good reimplementation of EC2. The only real impediment to an 'open' (you meant free, right?) cloud is that you can't use ec2-tools with it unless you want to fight off a pack of female Amazon warrior-lawyers. I hear their punches can leave a mark.

I'm too lazy to send them an e-mail, and the Slashdot comments are already calling 'em out anyway.

Arrays and Generics in Java do not mix very well. In order to create an array, you need to know the object class the array is supposed to store.Arrays in Java are special: they can efficiently store primitive data types. The expected difference in efficiency between byte[] and Byte[] is pretty big (of course some good VM might optimize) for obvious reasons (think of: references, garbage collection, pointer sizes, ...).This is probably why you need to know the type before creating an array (because an array of primitive types such as byte will be different from one that stores objects of some kind).In particular, the following Java code

  String[] foo = (String[]) new Object[0];

results in a run time error ("[Ljava.lang.Object; cannot be cast to [Ljava.lang.String;"). But it gets more confusing when you introduce generics:

public static <T> T[] test()  
  T[] te = (T[]) new Object[0];
  System.err.println(te.length);
  return te;
 String[] foobar = test();

will print "0", then throw the same run time error in the foobar line.What happens here is that in the test() method, T actually is replaced with "Object" at compile time. Thus the array type works just fine, and so does the call to te.length. Upon returning, it is then cast into a String[] array and fails.Now here comes a crazy Java hack:

public static <T> T[] test(T... ts)  
  T[] te = (T[]) java.lang.reflect.Array.
      newInstance(ts.getClass().getComponentType(), 0);
  System.err.println(te.length);
  return te;
 String[] foobar = test();

The exception is gone, foobar is of the proper type now!A result of discovering this hack are these two methods:

public static <T> T[] newArrayOfNull(int len, T... ts)  
  // Varargs hack!
  return (T[]) java.lang.reflect.Array.
      newInstance(ts.getClass().getComponentType(), len);
 public static <T> T[] toArray(Collection<T> coll, T... ts)  
  // Varargs hack!
  return coll.toArray(ts);
 

Notice how elegant the last method looks - and it finally allows you to do toArray(collection) instead of collection.toArray(new WhateverClassTheCollectionHas[0]).Note that this is still a hack, and may or may not work with all Java compilers, JREs and/or Java versions.Update: Note that this 'hack' is also not transitive. The context calling toArray needs to know the object type at compile time. So it doesn't save you much more than writing "new KnownClass[0]" etc.Update: So I'm actually not using this - it's just a hack, and often quite hackish. The problem is that when you call e.g. toArray in an Generics context, it will actually create an array of "Object", so it makes much more sense to verbosely specify the class you want to use for the arrays (and get some reliability in use back).

Since I can't use a Eucalyptus cluster without breaking the usage restrictions on the default ec2-tools apps, I'm writing a set of Python scripts to do the same job. The APIs that the tools use are well-documented and don't have onerous hand-tying usage restrictions.

So that should be 'fully functional' by next week. By fully functional I mean being able to bundle an AMI, upload it to a cloud, and manage it's instances without crashing or screwing up. I'm probably not going to bother supporting stuff that Eucalyptus doesn't support, since the main focus of this is Eucalyptus and not Amazon EC2.

I'll also include a command for saving cloud settings, i.e. "awstool savecloud --ec2-cert --cert --url rightscale" which then lets you do something like "awstool upload-image --cloud rightscale debian-lenny.ami".

Also, pkg-escience has agreed to host the Eucalyptus integration project, so you can follow along at:

git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-escience/awstool.git

Ignore the first commit's e-mail address of 'kmeisthax@Lappy-486'; I forgot to set some config somewhere before I did the initial push.

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 20 May) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there are indeed minutes to approve, a financial report, and a report on official correspondence related to DebConf10. For the 27th meeting in succession (feels like it anyway), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting because I ll be at another event, raising the FOSS banner for TTLLP while speakers tell everyone to proprietarise everything (based on the preview essays). Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted. In other news, the Koha foundation is still going through its birth pangs. I ve suggested associating with SPI in the meantime, so the project could manage assets better, but it s just not happening. I feel partly it s due to misconceptions about SPI and its activities, but there also seems to be some blind faith in private companies. I heard a quote about the current UK Parliament crisis which seems relevant to the situation: He is behaving as if he is just running this gentlemen s club. What we need to do is ask people to be involved.

Cooperatives-SW (which I m currently helping to direct) has been approved for Co-operative Enterprise Hub funding for 2009. Well done to Viv and the rest of the hard-working team who have been doing miracles for co-ops in this region with relatively little funding for so long now. (But if you ve got a pot of money to donate, let me know, please.) Industrial and Provident Societies are the traditional form for registering UK Co-operatives, but there are a number of things in its 1960s law which aren t reflected in general company law (which was mostly updated since the mid-1980s). For starters, IPSes are registered with the FSA, whose website isn t as good as Companies-House WebCHeck for Limited companies. Cooperatives-UK are pressing for the law to be modernised. C-UK sent us a status update (which I can t find on their website yet) this week. Amongst other things, they re seeking to introduce provisions to allow online registration and filing for IPSes. I ve asked them to take the opportunity to press for similar provisions for LLP Co-ops, or directing Companies House to act on any such existing provisions. At the moment, it seems unfair that LLPs are excluded from online filing, so paying double for routine administrative filings and relying on the increasingly dysfunctional Royal Mail. Finally, the next Cooperatives-SW print/PDF newsletter should be out next week. Hope to see lots of you at the AGM in Plymouth on 23 June!

The Koha IRC General Meeting finished quite late for us Europeans, so LibLime Developers Blog: Koha project IRC meeting (Galen Charlton) was the first report to appear. Rather than repeat it here, go read it there. See you on the first Wednesday of next month. Hopefully it will be a shorter meeting without nearly two years of backlog since the last meeting to cover!

There will be a general meeting on the #koha IRC channel on Wednesday, 6 May 2009 at 19:00 UTC with a nominal finish time of 21:00. To convert to your timezone, try date -d @1241636400 (thanks to SPI (Joerg?) for that idea). The meeting will include Koha 3.2/tip status and timeline, Koha 3.0.x status, Koha bugs database, KohaCon 2009 report. The full agenda is on the wiki. Connection details are shown on the wiki front page but are basically irc://irc.katipo.co.nz:6667/#koha Hope to see you there, or a summary should be linked from the comments here later.

Last Thursday, I went to the Social Enterprise summit regional workshop that I mentioned. Apparently, SEC are hoping that ministers Mandelson, Purnell, Byrne and Blears will be at the summit, along with people from various famous co-ops. I took along some email feedback I received on supporting new blood in social enterprise about needing help to bridge the gaps (financial, social, training) between taking on new members and them being productive enough to break even . Happily, that was echoed and reinforced by other delegates - I shared a table with people from Trinity Community Arts, AvonCDA, Sofa Project, Somerset Co-operative Services and Community Action. Emboldened by that, I ranted about the Business Support Simplification Programme (which seems to mean that only BusinessLinkSW has any gov.uk money in our region and they re being really poor at co-op support) and I threw a couple of ideological-explosives into the consultation, suggesting that franchising has failed as a way of spreading social enterprise and we need to start offering General Public Licensing of our business models, because we re not franchising businesses and most of us don t want to be. I wonder if that idea will detonate somewhere helpful. The Social Enterprise Coalition officers had some details of the support programmes that are already announced. One of them is a golden hello where the enterprise gets money when a new person joins. It s run by jobcentreplus. So yesterday, when I was at a Business Link Real help for business event, I asked the jobcentreplus officers there about it: apparently it s useless to TTLLP because all our workers are partners and not employees. I was expecting more support for co-ops from a Labour+Co-op government, but it shouldn t've been a surprise after the budget. After that, I don t think it s worth posting details of the other SE assistance programmes mentioned: they ll probably turn out to be equally useless for co-ops and I don t want to waste your time. I ll rant about that and the BusinessLinkSW event another day or in another place. Ask me if you want details and I ll put them in a comment or email them. And in that spirit, it s back to programming for me!

There is a Social Enterprise summit in London in May with cabinetoffice.gov.uk/thirdsector. As part of representing TTLLP to Cooperatives-SW, I will be at a regional workshop this afternoon to enable the sector to input the summit (?). More detail is available at tinyurl.com/cnm5c3 The workshop topics are

• fighting the recession ;
• social enterprise informing a rebalanced economy ;
• supporting new blood in social enterprise and
• scaling up the sector .

If you have any thoughts on those themes, please send them to me by IM, microblog or as a comment on this article. I may be commenting on identi.ca if I get internet at the event.

The UK Budget is out. I m pretty disappointed for TTLLP - the headlines for business look rather unhelpful to our co-op.

• It supports loss-making businesses - keeping our unsustainable competitors in business for longer,
• it spreads business rate up-rating - which we pay through rent on the few places we pay it, probably no change overall,
• it introduces a credit insurance scheme, also keeping our unsustainable competitors in business for longer by letting them run up more debt when the banks are cutting it off, and
• introducing a vehicle scrappage scheme which appears to discourage sustainable travel (which most members try to do), be open to abuse (is it just a buy-a-banger bonus?) and have other side-effects which can be seen in Germany and France already.

I m thinking that our co-op will see more benefit from the EU capping mobile telecoms prices, Earth Day or even Plone Day than UK Budget Day 2009. What s in the UK budget for you? I may have missed something useful for cooperatives, so please tell us if you spot something in it for us, too!

Raphael Bauduin emailed me to say that he s organising an event for Profoss: (28 april in Brussels) will take a look at legal aspects of the use of FOSS in professional environments. http://www.profoss.eu/events It will bring interesting information for most ICT professionals, even for those specialised in FOSS, but if this is not for you, it might be of interest to people around you (your boss or colleagues), so don t hesitate to spread the information around you. There is problem with the current website: it requires javascript. An updated site without that problem will appear very soon . If you go to the event, I d love to hear how it goes - please leave a comment on this article!

Irma and Bob of CALYX information essentials wrote in:

For those interested and not able to participate in the KohaCon 09 action in Plano. Some conferees are Twittering: Cover it live or pipes. Some are blogging Some again are having their photo taken on flickr. Presentations are starting to show up on slideshare tag kohacon09 and twitter #kohacon It sounds like a great conference!

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 15 April) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted, but a bit late, so there s another discussion about that going on behind the scenes. The frustrating thing is that fixing the announcements doesn t really need selling out to Google or anything complicated - simply using at on a server to schedule the email would work I know, because that s pretty much what I do at TTLLP for routine member emails. Only the secretary has posted any report at the time of writing and there are no discussion items. There are two sets of minutes up for approval, but one contains at least one error which I ve already described by email. Should be a short meeting, though. Once again (aren t Wednesday evenings awful for me?), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting. Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

Flowers I ve written a lot lately about my Grandma Klassen, who passed away this week. But I m going to start this post about my Grandma Goerzen. She died when I was just an infant. I never knew her, but as the years pass, it seems that I remember her better and better. After we moved out to the farm where she and Grandpa Goerzen lived for decades, we noticed some flowers she had planted 30 years ago were still coming up, having withstood hail, hot summers, frost, construction equipment, and neglect all that time. Terah said, It s like your grandma left us a housewarming gift. Some of these flowers had never bloomed. Until this week. One bloomed for the first time the day Grandma Klassen died. A second bloom appeared the day of her funeral. Music #1 My jr. high and high school band teacher loves music (and old engines, but that s another story). You couldn t sign up for band at my high school; you d sign up for the class called LIFE. To him, music and life are indistinguishable. He says that anybody can speak to somebody, but music is the best way to speak to the heart. My Grandpa Klassen died when I was 11. Grandma Klassen, before her health declined, loved to tell me the story of the music at his funeral. At his funeral, my mom and I played a piano duet of Nearer, My God to Thee which we had already learned for a different event. When we were done, Rev. Epp went to the pulpit and said something along the lines of, If the music in heaven is as good as that, it ll be a great place indeed. I was just 11, and though music did speak to me at that age already, I don t think I understood how it moved people, such as my grandma, until many years later. Music #2 Grandma Klassen loved music, too, and that s reflected in each of her children all of them play trumpet, for instance. So it s no surprise that there was a lot of music this week. She died as two of her children were singing hymns to her at her room in the nursing home. Two of her grandchildren played trumpet for her at her burial. And my brother and his wife played trumpet and piano at her funeral. It was all beautiful, and like my band teacher said, it spoke to my heart. Music #3 I knew about gradma s love of music for quite awhile. When she was in better health, I took her to concerts sometimes. One of her favorite hymns was Joyful, Joyful, but she hadn t known it was based on Beethoven s 9th Symphony. I learned that the Wichita Symphony Orchestra was performing the 9th, and took her to the performance. She loved it, and I seem to recall that she kept talking about it for a few years afterwards. It certainly didn t hurt that the singing on the 4th movement was in German. I burned her a new-fangled CD of it, which I frequently saw in or near her CD player. The Kansas Mennonite Men s Chorus is an all-volunteer choir with about 300 members. They give a couple of concerts a year, and occasionally tour throughout North America and Europe. Their motto is we sing that others may live because 100% of money collected at their concerts goes directly to charity. Attending one of their concerts is a powerful experience not easily forgotten. I think the only time I ve heard a choir come close to being as amazing as that was when I had the opportunity to attend a Robert Shaw concert a few years ago. I went with grandma to one of the Kansas Mennonite Men s Chorus performances a few years ago. As you might expect, she loved it I think she called it powerfully good. This year, I finally joined the choir. I still remember that first practice. We warmed up by singing Holy God, We Praise Thy Name a song that has opened every KMMC concert for years. These people hadn t sung together for almost a year, and there were plenty of new people like me there too. But it only took a few bars of singing before I realized just what it was I had joined. The choir started out with the quietest, but most powerful singing you can imagine: Holy God, we praise thy name. By the time we got to the end of the page, the building was ringing from 300 men singing Infinite thy vast domain, everlasting is thy reign! at the top of their voices, in perfect harmony. We got to the end. The director said. . . Wow. I don t think a first practice ever spoke to my heart before that day. Music #4 Nearly 20 years ago, Grandma Klassen bought me a new bible. After she gave it to me, I asked her what some of her favorite passages were. She took me straight to the blessing in Numbers 6, and made sure I underlined it and bookmarked it. It goes like this:

The Lord bless you,
The Lord keep you,
Make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you,
The Lord life up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

My uncle had read this blessing to her the last time he talked to her. And the KMMC for years has ended their concerts with a beautiful benediction based on this passage. Grandma heard it at the concert I attended with her. It has been a favorite of my mom for years, too. So I had the thought: we really ought to sing it as a benediction at her funeral. It was hard to find the right mix of people on short notice, but we wound up with me singing baritone, my brother singing 2nd tenor (we both normally sing bass), and his wife both playing piano and singing 1st tenor, and relying on the piano to fill in the bass part. We had a little chance to practice before the funeral, but not a lot. The two of them have done a lot musically, but I haven t nearly as much, so I got in some extra practice at home, too. When it came time to sing, it was an emotional moment for sure more than a bit hard to focus, knowing the history and meaning of these words. When we got to and give you peace , and moved into the chorus of amen that finishes the song, I almost broke down right there, but didn t quite. We didn t give a perfect performance, for sure, on such short notice. (And they had me singing with them, so we wouldn t have been perfect even with plenty of notice!) But it didn t have to be perfect. After we ended the last, quiet amen , I think I heard about a half-dozen noses blowing all at once. My band teacher was right about music speaking to the heart. Later, during lunch, my aunt said to me, Wow, John, I ve never heard you sing before! That s right, and this may be the last time you hear me sing, too! I don t normally sing in a small group like this. A few minutes later, my uncle that gave the message came over and talked to the three of us. John, today you three brainwashed me. Oh? Yes. For years, I thought that there was no music as beautiful as the trumpet. After hearing you three sing, I have to reconsider. And so my band teacher was also right: music is life. My grandma was a person that could hardly speak without touching the heart. That beautiful melody of her life didn t stop when she died Tuesday afternoon. I ve been hearing it all week.

from BloggersUnite resources It s Good Friday and even if you don t believe the stories, maybe you d like to do some good today. Here are some things you might want to support:-

• Earth Day 22 April 2009 - the two-year Green Generation initiative will culminate with the 40th anniversary of Earth Day in 2010;
• petition the Prime Minister [...] that all software produced by councils under the Timely Information to Citizens project be released under an open source licence by 7 May 2009;
• www.thebiglunch.com - have lunch in the street, Sunday 19 July

Copy of http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/04/msg00421.html. Hi folks, We have been pretty busy these past few weeks with the whole Google Summer of Code 2009 student application process.
I can say that we have this year a very good set of proposals and I d like to thank all the students and mentors for this. I am going to present to you our shortlist of projects that we would like to be funded and believe we can reasonably manage to get funded. As always, remember that the number of slots is not final yet at this point so we can t promise anything. The first preliminary slot count given today was *10* (same as last year) and we hope to get *2* more (as we did last year). This shortlist is alphabetically ordered because we don t want to reveal the current internal rankings. I am inviting you to debate what you think is cool, what is useful, what is important to Debian, maybe give us pointers to resources or people that could be helpful for the projects. We will try to alter our current rankings to reflect the zeitgeist in Debian, while taking into account the personal information that we have about each student involved. The deadline for any modification is on the 15th, so get everything in by the 14th. The final selected projects will be announced by Google April 20th, ~12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC. We ll have another announcement then. Three proposals need or may need a mentor, I indicated it. For more information about the projects or mentoring and how to talk to us directly, scroll down past the list. Debian s Shortlist : - Aptitude Package Management History Tracking
- Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling
- Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back
- Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings
- Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD
- KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager
- Large Scientific Dataset Package Management
- MIPS N32 ABI Port
- MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation
- On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration
- Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives
- Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite And the details: Aptitude Package Management History Tracking Student: Cristian Mauricio Porras Duarte, Mentor: Daniel Burrows Aptitude currently does not track actions that the user has performed beyond a single session of the program. One of the most frequent requests from users is to find out when they made a change to a package, or why a package was changed; we want to store this information and expose it in the UI in convenient locations. As a side effect, this might also provide some ability to revert past changes. Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling Student: Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Mentor: Marc Brockschmidt This proposal aims at providing debug binary packages for the packages in the Debian archive in an automatic manner, moving them away from the official Debian archive to an special one. This has the benefits of providing thousands of debug packages without any work needed from the developers, for all the architectures, without bloating
the archive. Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back Student: Diego Escalante Urrelo, Mentor: Margarita Manterola The Amancay project aims to be a new read/write web frontend to Debian s BTS; allowing DDs and contributors to easily interact with bugs via an intuitive yet powerful interface, enabling new workflows and creating new contribution opportunities like triaging while upholding reporting quality. Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings Student: Jonathan Yu, Mentor: (probably) Dominique Dumont see below This project proposes a common library for parsing and manipulating Debian Control files, including control, copyright and changelog. Main ideas include validating and parsing of these files, with both Strict and Quirks modes for the parser. The second idea is a new frontend for Debconf using Qt4 (for which Perl bindings will be written). Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD Student: Luca Favatella, Mentor: Aurelien Jarno GNU/kFreeBSD is currently using a hacked version of the FreeBSD installer combined with crosshurd as its own installer. While this works more or less correctly for standard installations (read: the exact same installation as in the documentation), it does not allow any changes in the installation process except the hard disk partitioning. This project is about porting debian-installer on GNU/kFreeBSD, and to a bigger extent, make debian-installer less Linux dependant. KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager Student: Mateusz Marek, Mentor: NEEDS MENTOR, see below. Finish Adept 3.0, a fully integrated package manager for Qt4/KDE4. Adept is currently the only viable path to a Debian native package manager on KDE that would support modern features such as tags, indexed search or good conflict resolving. With Aptitude-gtk still in development and only available for GTK+ and (K)PackageKit having fundamental problems, Debian needs this project to stay in control of its package management on KDE after much neglect in the recent years. Large Scientific Dataset Package Management Student: Roy Flemming Hvaara, Mentor: Charles Plessy Large public datasets, like databases for bioinformatics are typically too big and too volatile to fit the traditional source/binary packaging scheme of Debian. There are some programs that are distributed in Debian, like blast and emboss, that can index specialised databases, but Debian lacks a tool to install or update the datasets they need and keep their indexing in sync. MIPS N32 ABI Port Student: Sha Liu, Mentor: Anthony Fok This project first focuses on creating a new MIPS N32 ABI port for Debian. Different from O32 and N64, N32 is an address model which has most 64-bit capabilities but using 32-bit data structures to save space and process time. A second focus will be given on making such a mipsn32el arch fully optimized for the Loongson 2F CPU which gains more and more popularity in subnotebooks/netbooks in many countries. MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation Student: Per Andersson, Mentor: Wookey Many embedded devices have MTD onboard flash as persistent storage like the Kurobox Pro NAS, the Neo Freerunner, the Sheeva Plug or the OLPC. With MTD flash being so popular and with increases in capacity, support for MTD partition/installation would make Debian even more interesting to a wide range of of devices, making it one step closer to being universal. On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration Student: David Wendt Jr, Mentor: (probably) Steffen Moeller see below In many academic fields, as well as commercial industries, people use clusters to distribute tasks among multiple machines. Many times this is done by packaging a whole operating system disk image, uploading it onto the cluster, and having the cluster run it in a VM. This project intends to make it easier for Debian to distribute prepared disk images templates like they distribute CD images now, for the users to recreate or customise these templates with Debian packages and for administrators to host such clusters with Debian. Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives Student: Stephan Peijnik, Mentor: Michael Vogt The project would involve taking the distribution-(Ubuntu-)specific update-manager code, analyzing it, and creating a package with just its core functionality, decoupling the distribution-specific parts and thus making the core code extensible by distribution-specific add-ons. This in turn would remove the need of porting update-manager to Debian with every upstream release. An additional optional goal would be replacing the synaptics-backend with a python-apt based one. Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite Student: Philipp Kern, Mentor: Luk Claes Rewrite the software that currently runs the Debian autobuilding infrastructure in a way that makes it more maintainable and robust. It will use Python as its programming language and PostgreSQL for the database backend. By harmonizing buildds, many build failures can be prevented and wasteful workload on buildd volunteers can be reduced. On mentoring:

• KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager:

Petr Rockai, the original developer of Adept has offered help to anyone willing to adopt Adept. Sune Vuorela has offered help for any Qt4 and KDE related issues. *We really need a mentor here*. The student is quite competent but Google dictates that we provide a mentor to handle student management.

• Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings:

Dominique Dumont, although not DD, has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been confirmed yet. Sune Vuorela has offered to help co-mentor for the Qt4-Debconf and Qt4-Perl bindings part.

• On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration:

Steffen Moeller has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been formally confirmed yet. Charles Plessy of the Debian Med team will provide help for use cases related issues. Eric Hammond, developer of the original vmbuilder image creation tool and maintainer of a set of Debian and Ubuntu images will provide help for Amazon EC2 and image creation issues. Chris Grzegorczyk from the Eucalyptus team will provide help for Eucalyptus and Eucalyptus/Debian integration issues. Contacting us: Considering the tight schedule, most stuff happens live on IRC: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org You can also consult our wiki page for some additional information:
<http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2009> We have a mailing-list at:
<http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination> Keep this discussion on debian-devel@lists.debian.org while cc-ing soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org. This thread is for debian-devel primarily.