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.
Ok so there were some reactions to the Call for
help post. I had three
direct offers for help in pkg-xfce, not sure if other
teams had such propositions.
Some people asked me to correct various number for the
active contributors . Basically, the numbers are what
the feeling I got from people working in those team.
Julien Cristau wants me to correct the number of
debian-x active contributors to 0. (yes,
zero, that means nobody, nadie, personne). Basically he
doesn't have time anymore, and Brice Goglin can't really keep up.
So, for those who care about shiny X effects, and
stuff like that, you help would be gladly appreciated (and no, you
don't have to own each and every chipset in the world to give some
time).
Aurelien Jarno wants me to add that at the moment there are 2
(two) active libc contributors, plus one on
GNU/Hurd and one on kfreebsd.
Frans Pop wants me to add that there are ~85 people working on
d-i and that the problems the team might face aren't
only related to the lack of manpower (and I don't really want to
enter politics)
Finally, it seems that some people (well, only one at the
moment, but it's enough for to feel the need to precise) though the
numbers previously given would dismiss contributions for the active
contributors. That wasn't my intention, so I apologize if you
are an active contributor in one of that team
and thought I dismissed your contribution. If it wasn't clear
enough, my point is to show that quite some teams
are lacking manpower (some team miss other
things too, like leadership, coordination or whatever) and users
shouldn't be scared to contribute to them. Those are core teams,
without them Debian wouldn't work at all (not to mention
derivatives), so it's a good idea to join them.
Now, what if you do want to help, but don't know
how. On the previous post I gave links to teams website, wiki page
or QA page. You should be able to find a mailing list or contact
mail you should be able to write to. Just write that you want to
offer some help, that you don't know how and where to start. Add
what you're interested in, what you find fun, and your technical
knowledge. Don't be shy, and you don't need to be a Debian
Developer (nor even a Debian Maintainer) to
contribute.
Thanks!
Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD
team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official
announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow
shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who
did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We
appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before
going to Argentina.
This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel
image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the
infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs.
Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this
release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the
As I am one of those who have read “able” instead of “unable”, I had to find a really cheap flight. This may sound crazy, but an Iberia flight to Buenos Aires from Berlin costs far less than from Lyon (where I live) or even from Madrid: 781.12 EUR from Berlin instead over 1,200.00 EUR from Madrid and over 1,300.00 EUR from Lyon (in both cases with a change in Madrid Barajas).
I wonder if Iberia pays you 420,00 EUR if you flight from Berlin to Madrid…
Now I have to find a cheap way to go to Berlin from Lyon (probably an EasyJet flight). I plan to spend a few days of holiday in Berlin before flying to Argentina.
