Oct 24 2009
From left to right: Obey Arthur Liu, Olly Betts, Stefano Zacchiroli, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Sylvestre Ledru, Jelmer Vernooij.
Dear Planet,
We arrived at the Google Summer of Code 2009 Mentor Summit and are having a blast here. The weather is awesome, the candies are plenty and the conference rooms are comfy at the Googleplex. We will write to you again soon.
Cheers
The Debian people – Arthur, Olly, Zack, Dirk, Sylvestre, Jelmer
Jul 22 2009
My travel plan:
I will be presenting the Google Summer of Code at Debian talk:
Google Summer of Code 2009 at Debian
Presentation of the projects and their status
Day DebConf day 2 (2009-07-25) Room Upper talkroom Start time 10:00 Duration 01:00 This event will gather the admins, mentors and students of the 2009 Google Summer of Code at Debian to present our organization work, the students, their projects and how they are doing.
At the time of Debconf9, our students should be way into their projects. The Debian organization of the 2009 run of the Summer of Code will be presented and discussed, gathering feedback, especially in regard of the relation between the projects and the rest of the community. This event will be an opportunity for mentor and student pairs to present the projects they have been working on and update about their progress, and for the Debian community to give face to face feedback and help.
I missed the Keysigning Party deadline so I will be bringing paper slips with my key. I’d be happy to sign your key:
pub 4096R/29C0FFEE 2009-05-18 Key fingerprint = 9590 8AA6 E4F7 BAA7 8BD6 C148 F1A6 9BE4 29C0 FFEE uid Obey Arthur Liu <arthur@milliways.fr> uid Obey Arthur Liu <arthurliu@google.com> uid Obey Arthur Liu <obey.liu@ensimag.imag.fr> uid Obey Arthur Liu <graffit@graffit.net> uid Obey Arthur Liu <obey.liu@lzb.fr> uid Obey Arthur Liu <arthur.randolph@gmail.com> sub 4096R/15D7FD9B 2009-05-18
May 19 2009
Here comes the new 4096 bit RSA key, replacing the old (2002) 8CA99047 1024 bit DSA key:
pub 4096R/29C0FFEE 2009-05-18 Key fingerprint = 9590 8AA6 E4F7 BAA7 8BD6 C148 F1A6 9BE4 29C0 FFEE uid Obey Arthur Liu <arthur@milliways.fr> uid Obey Arthur Liu <obey.liu@ensimag.imag.fr> uid Obey Arthur Liu <graffit@graffit.net> uid Obey Arthur Liu <obey.liu@lzb.fr> uid Obey Arthur Liu <arthur.randolph@gmail.com> sub 4096R/15D7FD9B 2009-05-18
In other news, I found a great flatshare on Riedmattstrasse in Kreis 3 in Zürich with a fellow Google summer intern. Thanks to all (Jeroen, Martin, Jaroslavs, Giacomo..) who gave me pointers about finding accomodation in Zürich. I’m looking forward to a great summer there.
* It did involve generating about 40 millions gpg keys on a few très badass computing clusters
UPDATE: Come on guys. Of course I followed basic key management rules. The clusters which generated the actual final keys were under my direct control and the particular slice which generated this published key is on my desk.
May 01 2009
I got a summer internship at Google in Zürich, Switzerland, so I’ll be moving there this summer. Any DD working there ?
I already went to Zürich once last year and it was quite a cool place. I briefly met Cate and I know that there are other DDs there (hi Madduck!). I look forward to meeting more of you.
Now there are two issues I’d like help with, dear Züricher Lazyweb, housing and flight to DebConf.
Looking for an apartment in Zürich seems very very very hard.. So far I only found a few apartment/hotel geared towards rich expats staying for few months (the kind like Citadines). It’s ungodly expensive (like 2200+ CHF a month for one room), but sure available and well placed..
Here’s what I need:
I don’t have much more criterias, as long as I can find something. We’re about a few dozens Google interns all (desperately) looking for accomodation in Zürich. We’re all good neighbours, don’t party all night and all have very good references. Please contact me if you \<know someone who\>* know something, I’d be very grateful.
I’m going to DebConf this year in Spain, along with all the Google Summer of Code students who can make it. I’m going to reserve my flight in the next few days. I think I’ll only go to DebConf proper, arriving on the 23rd and leaving on the 31st of July.
I’m not decided yet on the last point.
So, any of you coming to DebConf from Zürich ?
Apr 10 2009
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apr 08 2009
A quick update before the big one about the 2009 Google Summer of Code.
I believe we had a great recruitment drive this year and we have a very good set of proposals to work with. We’d like to thank everyone involved for their help. We’re now ranking out student applications.
I promised elsewhere that I’ll send out our shortlist of projects once Google sends us our preliminary slot allocation today but I misread the thread on the -mentors list and that count will only happen on Thursday, so we’ll have to wait a bit more. That shortlist would only include projects, but not individual students. The idea is to give a heads up to everyone before committing to a group of projects and students. It is very important to inform the community as it increases visibility of the students work, giving them more help and support (and also avoids duplicating existing not yet publicized work!).
As far as mentors go, we should have all of our approximately 14 planned projects covered, except for 2. I’m posting them here in case you could mentor or help find mentors for those projects. (The wiki pages are not really up to date, so please come on IRC and ask clarifications, see below)
Finish Petr Rockai’s Adept 3.0 and bring a Qt4 Package Manager to Debian, with a different interface paradigm than Aptitude-gtk.
Petr said he would provide help with the existing codebase but can’t mentor. Sune Vuorela from Debian KDE is ready to help with Qt4 related issues.
Build Debian tools to create Debian images for Amazon EC2 and the free Eucalyptus implementation. Packaging of the Eucalyptus hosting framework is also possible.
For this project, we already have on board to help: Charles Plessy from Debian Med, Eric Hammond, developer of the existing vmbuilder Ubuntu tool for EC2 and Chris Grzegorczyk and Rich Wolski, from the Eucalyptus team. Plenty of people to get help from.
Mentoring is a great experience! See this for what it entails.
If we still can’t find a mentor by the end of the week, I’ll blast an announcement over at debian-devel@l.d.o along with the project shortlist.
In the meantime, don’t forget to idle on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org.
Mar 19 2009
Copy of debian-devel-announce.
We’re happy to announce that Debian has been accepted again as one of the mentoring organizations for this year’s Google Summer of Code.
According to the timeline for this year’s program, we will only have a few days to get set up and ready. Student applications will be accepted between the 23rd of March and 4th of April, but we’re already being contacted by students interested in working with us. That means that if you want to get involved as a mentor or a student, you don’t have very long. We’re also still actively looking for more project ideas – what would you like somebody to work on? You don’t need to be able to mentor a project to propose it.
Both students and mentors will have to register on the new Melange application. Once you’ve edited your profile, you will have a ‘linkid’. Always keep it at hand. We will need it to process registrations and applications to match it with who you are.
If you’d like to mentor, you will need to ‘apply to become a mentor‘ and click on Debian in the list of orgs. Also please add yourself to the Debian wiki page and keep in touch with us (see below). Once you’ve done that, the admins will be able to approve you so you can be added into the official Debian mentors list. Please add any specific ideas that you may have, or if you have nothing specific then list the areas where you think you could mentor a student. Existing Debian developers are preferred as mentors, as that will make things easier on some fronts (e.g. sponsored package uploads, data setup on Debian-hosted machines). But that’s not a hard and fast rule.
If you’re a student hoping to work on Debian this summer in SoC, please get in contact with us (see below) to talk about project ideas, either what we already have listed or your own. It’s in everybody’s interests to work on applications as much as possible before the deadline closes to improve their chances of acceptance. Ideally we want to encourage new blood to join in and contribute, but we’ll be happy to accept high quality applications from anybody that meets Google’s eligibility requirements.
We can be contacted at:
Good luck to all involved; may all your code be merged in squeeze!
Mar 13 2009
Just a quick update to let you know how the Debian bid for the Google Summer of Code is going.
We’re doing great right now. Our application is sent out, you can consult the public part here.
This year, we’re committed to doing a great Summer of Code performance, starting first by improving communication with the Debian community.
We opened a Twitter feed for you Twitter freaks: http://twitter.com/DebianGSoC. It will be updated with live information relevant to students and devs alike during the whole summer.
UPDATE: We’re now also on identi.ca : http://identi.ca/debiangsoc 
We now have 12 applications on our wiki. Come, add your ideas and discuss them on our IRC channel (#debian-soc on irc.debian.org) and mailing-list.
Mar 03 2009
In case you’ve been living under a rock these past years, I shouldn’t have to tell you what this is about . Well, just in case.
The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an international program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Debian has participated since 2006, mentoring dozens of students on Debian projects.
The important part of the 2009 edition of the Google Summer of Code is going to start next week with the Organizations application period (March 9th). By that time, we should have listed a reasonable number of ideas on the dedicated wiki page.
We will try this year to improve on the performance of the previous years, starting first with more and more dedicated manpower. If you have some time to spare to help manage our Summer of Code bid this year, we can make it a much better experience for the students and for Debian.
Help is immediately needed in many areas. Some examples:
By mid-March, we will need:
Further in the spring:
In the summer:
As you can see, there is much work ahead. It’s time to pitch out your favorite pet project
Remember! The Summer of Code has become a prominent outreach forum for open source organizations. It puts a spotlight on each of them to provide a well-rounded and deep experience of open source development.
Right now, you can help with the Wiki, join us on IRC on #debian-soc on OFTC or join the mailing-list at soc-coordination on alioth.
The short “flyers-friendly” URL for the Summer of Code at Debian is : <http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc>. Publicize it!
See you this summer!
Feb 08 2009
Actually, I went to FOSDEM 2009.
It was really a blast. I would thank the whole FOSDEM team and the Debian team, especially the video team who did a fascinating work doing video streaming the right way (!= simple way).
Here are the slides for my talk (Debian and Google Summer of Code 2008: wrap-up and insights) in PDF format: debian-fosdem09-gsoc08. The videos of the talks of this FOSDEM should be up soon and I will post the extended version of what I said as a blog post; as soon as I’ve finished merging the changes from the slides back onto the blog post.
Cheers and see you at the next FOSDEM.
LH: cheers, really cool talk right now.
