Apr 08
Google Summer of Code at Debian: Update, need mentors!
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.
April 8th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Clarification: Though I did write a predecessor to the Ubuntu vmbuilder EC2 plugin (at http://code.google.com/p/ec2ubuntu/) the actual development of vmbuilder itself is being done by other smart Ubuntu developers and I helped out with a bit of testing of the EC2 portion.