Six impossible things

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.

Packaging

• Large dataset manager: download and update local copies of public datasets, and integrate them in Debian with the tools we packaged.
• Mergemaster: perform 3-way merge of config files on upgrades by keeping a copy of original config files.
• Aptitude packages query UI and language: improve the GTK+ search UI and language for complex packages queries
• Aptitude search ranking and presentation: improve the presentation of search results with substring highlighting, relevancy ranking…
• Aptitude history tracking: extend and build on the packages actions history tracking features of Aptitude

Debian Installer

• MTD support in d-i: add MTD installation support to the Debian Installer
• Debian-Installer support for GNU/kFreeBSD: replace the currently used FreeBSD sysinstall with Debian-Installer running possibly under a FreeBSD kernel

Blends

• blends webtools: enhancing DebianPureBlends webtools by using UltimateDebianDatabase

Bug tracking

• Debbugs Read/Write Soap Interface: overhaul the existing read-only SOAP Debbugs interface with submission and manipulation capabilities
• Debbugs Web UI: Modern web interface for submitting and manipulating bugs.debian.org’s bugs
• Mylyn plugin for debbugs: Plugin for Mylyn to support debbugs, allowing the management of Debian bug reports from the inside of Eclipse.

Building infrastructure

• Building a new interface for Wanna-build using PostgreSQL: replace the existing setup of multiple MLDBM databases with an extensible and flexible relational database for use both by wanna-build and other tools such as web CGI scripts

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:

• Map out which areas in Debian could benefit from a Summer of Code project and connect the right people with the right projects ideas
• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

By mid-March, we will need:

• Dedicated documentation to present Debian to the prospective student
• Publicity material to promote the Summer of Code at Debian
• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

Further in the spring:

• Mentors, people to review proposals, do interviews
• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

In the summer:

• Mentoring students
• Testing and feedback for projects
• Internal communication with the community

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!

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.

UPDATE: The slides of the FOSDEM 2009 talk about this are here. They include analysis and recommendations for the next Summer of Code.

Welcome back for the last part of the reviews. You may want to look at the previous parts :  part 1 and part 2.

Jigdo-ivory, a JavaScript Jigdo client

Presentation

“Debian CDs and DVDs take up a huge mount of space on download servers. Using jigdo to download those images can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth and space needed on the central servers. Unfortunately, jigdo currently needs special client software to be downloaded/installed first. Adding support directly into a browser-based application could potentially make a very big difference for first-time users here.”

Jigdo was created in 2001. It allowed to create ISOs from .debs grabbed from regular mirrors. It eliminated the need to duplicate the entire contents of the package repository into ISO files for each release, or even more importantly, for weekly snapshots of testing/unstable/whatever.

You may find the complete proposal from the student here. The original idea originated from the Debian-CD people, who wanted to explore ideas about creating a light web client. The project was mentored by Steve McIntyre, who developed a new version of the Jigdo tools, jigit, which is much more efficient.

Student

Dustin Rayner was a 5th year senior undergraduate student at the Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I studied Computer Engineering for 3 years as a Computer Engineering student before deciding to pursue a Mathematics and Computer Science degree.

Result

This project was unsuccessful due to numerous issues. First, because of an inadequate technical preparation of the original proposal. The Debian-CD people were too optimistic with the possibilities of Javascript. In the end, the copying and checksumming part of the Jigdo process were implemented but the checksumming (with a Javascript implementation of md5) was so slow that it was unusable (think 50kb/s on a regular laptop at full CPU charge). The student did the right thing to investigate Java and ActiveX but it was too late unfortunately and he ultimately lacked the experience and knowledge in the relevant technologies.

If the proposal is tried again, the student would be requested to have much more experience with Java (and possibly ActiveX). Those would be much more efficient for the task, as they are the most used technologies among on-line anti-virus scanners, which have a workload somewhat similar to Jigdo.

I could not find further public involvement of Dustin Rayner within Debian.

Aptitude-gtk, usability and GTK+ GUI for the Aptitude package manager

Presentation

“A GTK+ GUI for Aptitude that will work alongside improved current ncurses and command-line interfaces. This will offer an alternative to Synaptic with an interface design geared toward usability and advanced functionality.”

Debian currently supports multiple non-command-line package managers, the most used being Synaptic and Aptitude. Synaptic uses a GTK+ interface but offers no command-line mode. Aptitude offers a command-line mode but no X interface, although it offers a ncurses interface.
Comparing the interfaces of Synaptic and Aptitude reveal many design differences. Although Synaptic may be more accessible to beginners, Aptitude offers many interface behaviors and functions that are useful to the regular to advanced users : fully hyperlinked tabbed navigation between packages and versions of packages, mostly modeless interface, interactive dependency conflict resolver…

The proposal was introduced by the student in coordination with Daniel Burrows, the mentor and developer of Aptitude.

Student

Obey Arthur Liu was a 22 year old french student of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Grenoble Institute of Technology – ENSIMAG, in France. Did I mention that he’s also yours truly ? If you want to know more, you might be interested in my previous post.

Result

This project was successful. The interface was mostly done and functional by the end of the summer. Daniel merged the code into the main post-lenny branch. Development is still ongoing and packages are released into Experimental. For further information, just read the rest of my blog.

I could find some further public involvements of Obey Arthur Liu within Debian. Doh!

Lintian for fuller automated setups

Presentation

“lintian, the Debian package checker, at the moment presents possible problems in three categories: errors, warnings and informational messages. This leads to several problems, most importantly that the severity and certainty of a check can’t be expressed separately. In the course of this project, the student should design and implement in lintian an improvement of the current situation, for example by using a two-letter code (one for certainty, one for severity).”

This project would make lintian errors much more fine-grained and help in maintaining pertinent quantitative analysis of package quality.

The project was mentored by Marc Brockschmidt. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the Lintian team.

Student

UPDATED: Jordà Polo Bardés has done a lot of work with translation in Catalan, his native tongue. He can usually be found on #debian-catalan. He also maintains a few packages as a DM.

Result

This project was successful. The classification was entirely done. Jordà also helped with the new lintian.debian.org website. The Lintian team was very satisfied with the revamped errors list and new website. They have an immediate impact on packages quality reporting.

Jordà is still active within Debian, helping package a few games.

Debexpo, a generic web-based package repository

Presentation

“mentors.debian.net is currently a very specialized web-based repository that allows everybody to contribute software packages to Debian without the need to be a Debian Developer (or Debian Maintainer). It has successfully helped simplifying the sponsoring process in the last years. However it needs to be refactored and in the process should be turned into a generic piece of software that can be used for other Debian source/binary package repositories, too.”

Mentors is a very good initiative to recruit new packages maintainers (and needs your help!) and the software underlying it could be reused for many different purposes (think PPA).

The project was mentored by Christoph Haas. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the mentors team.

Student

Jonny Lamb was a Computer Science student in the United Kingdom. He was already quite involved within Debian, maintaining a lot of significant packages.

Result

This project was successful. The whole proposal was perfectly executed. Jonny now continues to develop debexpo, with the mailing-lists and commit logs showing interesting activity. Of course, help for debexpo is appreciated to get it into full shape.

Jonny has since become a Debian Developer (here is his AM report). Congratulations to him.

It’s nice to end on a nice note isn’t it ? Now that we’re done with the individual reports, I’m going to write down my recommendations report. Hopefully it will help with next year’s Summer of Code.

I’ve so far been going through the list of projects that were done last year (part 1, part 2) in a somewhat dry fashion so I’m going to make a little pause here and tell where I’m going from with these posts.

As I went through the 2008 Summer of Code at Debian, I moved from being a nearly total outsider student to something more of a developer. I’ve been contributing to Aptitude since the end of the Summer of Code (well, trying to find time to contribute more, as with many people..) and will be going to FOSDEM. I can’t say I’m an insider yet: I haven’t met a lot of people, most people have no idea who I am, I’ve been active here for, like 9 months and I’m not even in new-maintainer yet (though I plan to apply when I feel I’ll have contributed significantly to Debian).

The Student point of view

See, I’m a student in Computer Science. I use free software, I’d like to participate but it’s intimidating and you never know where to start. You know the drill. Then comes the Google Summer of Code. Let’s review its stated goals, as per its FAQ:

Google Summer of Code has several goals:

• Get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all;
• Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development;
• Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers;
• Provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits (think “flip bits, not burgers”);
• Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette).

I’m going to start with these goals and provide some of my opinions in something of a candid way.

Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development

I have been playing with the idea of making a GUI for Aptitude ever since I dropped Synaptic, about 2 months into its use. It felt like when I bought a high-school required Texas Instruments TI-83+, that I dropped for a TI-89 within a month. Since back in 2005, every time I would see someone using Synaptic, I would pitch Aptitude as a better tool. The main reason for not doing so was that Aptitude was scary-looking. See, it’s a lot of blocky text and wacky colors.

With life and cool stuff like CPGE, I never had time to really code so I left it at that. In 2008, for the first time I was free the whole summer and so, I tried to get into the Summer of Code program and into Debian.

Actually, it wasn’t the first try. One popular way to get acquainted with Debian is to go to wnpp, adopt a package (new or orphaned) and find a mentor to upload it. In January 2008, I did try to package a set of geocaching tools I used at that time. But I didn’t find a mentor to upload it. I didn’t try very hard though and the package had some minor issues anyway. I reckon that Debian-mentor is a good idea to bring in new Debian Maintainers but the whole process is still quite technical. It is true that the minimal technical level for good packaging is not trivial in itself and the process should filter out unserious people, but the technicality curve could be adjusted to be more welcoming.

I think the Debian website could be improved in this area (ok, it’s a quite long-standing bug). Holger Levsen mentioned the way Fedora and Sugar presented avenues of collaboration to prospective developers. The crux here is that it should feel much easier to identify areas to get involved into and who to contact if needed.

Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers

Actually, it would rather be the other way around: help students identify and integrate into open source projects.

For the Summer of Code, I only postulated at two organizations, Debian and Freenet (the ones working on an anonymous darknet, remember ?). I got accepted at both and ultimately chose Debian (was my first choice from the beginning).

The Debian developers community is quite unique in the way it is very decentralized, independent and fluid. There are teams in some areas (Kernel, KDE, Translation, Edu, Publicity, whatever) but much of what makes up Debian is done by individual developers working on their own.

The downside of this is that for a newcomer, it’s a little off-putting. Organized teams are not the way all things are done within Debian so there are often no smaller circle of people one gets to know. Going to Debian meetings and not knowing most of the people is a little intimidating. Keeping up with all the faces is a little hard too .

Many other organizations participated into the Summer of Code and many would feel arguably different. Many may be more corporate-like, more hierarchical, more centralized. I preferred Debian because it was less formal in its structure. I felt that I didn’t want to get into something that looked too much like work with supervisors and the like. It is indeed how it felt, there were no one up there to decide what we had to do. We were quite independent.

I can say that the Summer of Code is quite a good way to get a feeling of how a particular organization works in the inside.

Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios

As said earlier, many parts of Debian are independent, which is a result of the work separation through packages. In my work on Aptitude, it is a pity that I didn’t have to interact a lot with other members of the Debian community. Aptitude talks with the rest of the Debian packaging ecosystem through mature library interfaces so there’s not much need to ask questions beyond them, and even more so because my Daniel Burrows, my mentor and developer of Aptitude participated in their development. Also, I was working on bringing a graphical interface to it, so I didn’t have to modify a lot of core code that interacted with the outside world.

Despite this, I still met a few people interested with future developments in the area of package managers. One example is Enrico Zini who pushed his work with Xapian APT Index. Over the summer, my mentor integrated packages search through Xapian which was interesting with the expanded possibilities of a graphical interface such as search as you type, drop down suggestions and so on.

Because of the short duration of the Summer of Code, most projects can’t complete a full development cycle. The proposed work in my proposal was quite imposing. In the end, I managed to produce an (probably not even) alpha quality version of a graphical interface. My branch (if I remember correctly) was merged into the main trunk at the end of the summer and a version landed in Experimental at the end of the year.

One aspect that I missed was beta-testing feedback. During summer, only a handful people popped up on the mailing-list giving feedback on the GUI I was writing, although I knew through stats on my mercurial repository that dozens of people cloned it and followed it. Debian has no “testing team”, or any kind of semi-organized group of people who try stuff, which would be very useful to have an idea of how well I was doing.

So, did the Summer of Code at Debian give me “real-world software development scenarios” ? Not really in my case but by staying longer into Debian, I think caught up a little with that.

Here is some advice for the future Summer of Code student at Debian:

• the work of a Linux distribution might look a little nebulous and mysterious but the reality is that Debian does a very large range of development work: web development (debexpo), user application development (aptitude-gtk), hardware interaction (Debian NAS), developer infrastructure (lintian) or even quite theoretical stuff (debgraph)… there is really a lot to choose from.
• Debian is not a nanny-project: you will not be managed, you’re free, but you’re on your own, be prepared
• don’t hesitate to contact anybody working in areas you’re interested in: look for packages maintainers, search mailing lists and wiki, look for debconf/fosdem/wherever talks by Debian developers. Developers will be happy to redirect you to the right people.
• choose something that can be reasonably finished by summer’s end. Also take into account release freezes.
• be sure to contact anyone involved into the area you’re working on: they will try to make it easier to merge your work in
• be sure to contact anyone involved into the area you’re working on: it’s ok to ask for help
• publicize your work: the Debian Project News will be happy to take your “press releases”, write a blog and get included on the planet, go on #debian-devel and #debian-soc, go to conferences and meetings
• you’re not alone, interact with the other Summer of Code students, try out their code, give them feedback
• Communicate, nobody will kill you if you say something stupid
• Communicate, don’t be afraid if you run into problems
• Communicate, clear enough ?

To conclude, despite all the difficulties, I would say that the Summer of Code at Debian was awesome. Although Debian is quite different from many other organizations, it was a very fruitful experience. And that’s why I’m still here.

Coming next is the rest of the projects reviews and a more concise and substantive list of recommendations for the handling of the next Summer of Code at Debian. And of course, see you at FOSDEM.

Here’s for the second installment of my review of this past year’s Summer of Code at Debian. See the previous part here: Debian Summer of Code ‘08 : Where are they now (part 1/3).

I apologize for being so late at getting this second part out but I have been very busy. Still, I’ll get the last part out before FOSDEM. Those of you who ever had to write a Java compiler (ok, Java subset, but the OOP part was here…) in brainfucking Ada will understand what I went through working on two of my most loathed languages.

Debian NAS, improve support of Debian on NAS devices

Presentation

“There is a large range of inexpensive Network storage devices available on the market. For some of them, such as Linksys NSLU-2 and Thecus N2100, we have added support, but there is many many more devices we could support. For this summer we look forward at supporting multiple Marvell Orion based devices (as outlined in Martin Michlmayr’s talk Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices), such as Revogear Kuro Box Pro, Buffalo Linkstation, QNAP TS-109+,…”

If you don’t have old computers lying around to turn into NAS servers, you need to sleep at night without the soothing sound of computer fans or if you actually pay your own electricity bill, you might want to have a look at standalone NAS devices. They’re cheap and can be made vastly more capable by slapping a Debian on it. If you ever heard of DD-WRT, you know the spirit.

The project was mentored by Riku Voipio, with help from Martin Michlmayr. The project proposal (sorry, Google cache) was introduced by Martin, who did a presentation about it the previous year at FOSDEM.

Student

Per Andersson was a 24 year old student working towards a MSc in computer science at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

He had been looking for ways to join Debian but with school still being priority one, he didn’t find time to dive in.

Result

This project was successful. The Kurobox Pro is now supported and several useful tools were packaged to make life easier with these NAS devices. Martin Michlmayer is still working on Debian NAS related stuff.

Per was happy to be invited to the Emdebian work session in Extremadura and has been active within debian, maintaining the packages he created during the Summer of Code.

Cran2deb, generate Debian packages from R packages

Presentation

“GNU R has become the preeminent platform for ‘computing with data’. The CRAN archives contain over 1300 source packages of very high-quality, and BioConductor has again almost as many focuses on bioinformatics. We want more of these in Debian, and going beyond the 50+ packages we currently have suggests more scripting and automation.”

R is a pretty big among statisticians and all of them they wasted no time writing their own package to work on particular research subject. It’s a lot like Perl with CPAN or LaTeX with CTAN. It’s always a pain to discovery that a particular R package is not wihtin Debian and having to resort to unmanaged installation of said packages.

The project was mentored by Dirk Eddelbuetel. The project proposal (which is nowhere to be found but seemed to be good) was introduced by Dirk, along with another proposal he did for R.

Student

Charles Blundell is a research student at.. hum.. didn’t do my homework about that. Anyway, you can find him around R related projects.

Result

This project was successful. Cran2deb is happilly turning more than 1400 of the ~1500 CRAN R packages, all with correct dependencies. The work has since been moved to R-Forge. It’s working, we’re almost there. We just need it to be polished and we’ll get a whole bunch of new packages into Debian.

Charles pinged me about the status of Cran2Deb after the previous post. He admits that he hasn’t done much about cran2deb recently because of his new position as a research student but hopes to commit again to it soon. I do encourage him to get these R packages into Debian. I had to manually install some packages myself when I had to use R for school because they weren’t into Debian and it’s not pretty.

Mergemaster, interactively merge changes in configuration files

Presentation

“FreeBSD has a shellscript called mergemaster which is used to interactively merge changes in configuration files, based on 3-way diffs. Debian’s approach to configuration file differences is much more primitive: either keep the original file, or blow it away (including all local changes) and use the Debian-provided file. It would be nice to get a system such as mergemaster into Debian. Important is to remember that Debian contains two often-used configuration file management systems: ucf, and conffiles; porting mergemaster in such a way that it will be used in both cases would be great.”

The handling of configuration files during upgrades has always been a little.. brutal, with the user being asked at gunpoint to make a good decision, lest the upgrade won’t continue or configuration files get borked (ever tried automerging nagios configuration files?). Having a less stressful upgrade experience is a good thing since the point of Debian is to make package management a stressless thing.

The project was mentored by, hum, Manoj Srivastava. I have no idea who came up at first with the proposal.

UPDATE: Wouter Verhelst mailed to say that he made the original proposal.

Student

Max Wiehle was a physics student at the University of Heidelberg. He did a Summer of Code stint (Archive.org copy..) as a student for Beagle Project in 2006 which, I suppose, was successful. He’s been active in the past with Gnome and desktop related projects.

Result

This project was somewhat successful. He posted an update one month into the program with repositories with code to test. Last commit to the mergecf branch of project was September 19th but it was never merged in. According to Steve McIntyre, it’s dead, Jim.

I couldn’t find any further public involvement of Max within Debian.

PAM NSS Debian Installer, improve support of PAM and NSS at install-time

Presentation

“It would be very important for the Debian allowing the user to configure additional PAM and NSS modules (eg. LDAP, NIS) during the installation process inside the Debian Installer. To do this, we have to provide tools and helpers to modify /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/pam.d/common-*, as well as changing the maintainer scripts for the packages libpam-* and libnss-* to apply the required changes at install time using debconf and these helpers.”

To be honest, I will probably never use this. I don’t do that many coordinated installs in the same place to warrant doing funny authentication with PAM and NSS, and if I did, I would probably use a more elaborate tool to personalize the install, like FAI. On the other hand, I can see the appeal of being done with authentication mechanisms before the first boot.

The project was mentored by Fabio Tranchitella. The proposal came from the student.

Student

Juan Luis Belmonte was a computer science student. He worked in a couple of companies in the area of Sarragossa. He is now founding debug_mode=ON.

Result

This was quite a disappointement after seemingly good work. Although Juan was satisfied with the project, the PAM package maintainer (Steve “Vorlon” Langasek) was not. He was never asked about this project (but didn’t intervene timely either when the accepted projects were announced though). In his words, it was “the wrong solution to the problem”. You can find his lenghty rationale on the wontfix bug report that resulted from the project. It really was a problem of communication with the Debian developpers since Juan could certainly have done the right work if pointed to it. Juan didn’t ask thoroughly for existing work and Steve didn’t publicize his (enough).

That’s all for now. The information is quite fragmented I admit. Most of it was pulled from Google, mailing lists, commit logs, blogs, whatever. If some projects are lacking in information here, it’s because I couldn’t find it readily (which is an issue in itself!).

In my next post, I’ll try to give a student point of view of the Summer of Code in general, and more specifically, at Debian. It will be post 2.5/3 since it’s getting a little longer than I planned. Release early, release often, as the say.

If you’re a student or a mentor mentioned above, feel free to fill any of the blanks in my report. It’s much appreciated. You’re not a student or mentor mentioned above and have an opinion on how to improve the next Debian Summer of Code ? Feel free to comment.

It’s been a while now since the 2008 Summer of Code ended. This year, twelve (?) projects were selected. That’s twelve students working full time on a Debian-related project during the summer.

The Google Summer of Code has sometimes been criticized in the past for having a poor student-developer retention rate inside the host projects. One of the goals of the program has always been to bring new people to budding or established free software organizations and it’s a pity that some would leave the project as soon as the program ends.

On the other end, poor integration of created code within the project leads to work that is hard to merge in, or worse, doesn’t get merged in at all. That’s a waste of time and resources and a probably cause of global warming as well.

Hopefully, it’s not always the case. Some people choose to stay committed within the organization in the long-term. Useful code gets merged in and pushed to the public.

I am going to give a talk about this at FOSDEM (go to FOSDEM!) so I’m giving you a little preview. I need your help to collect information for my talk. As you know, information is always hard to come by with these kinds of projects so anything can be useful.

Without further ado, let’s have a look at the cast of the Debian Google Summer of Code 2008:

Netconf, a network configuration management system

Presentation

“Netconf is a network configuration management system designed with modern network infrastructures and the needs of roaming users in mind.” It is a personal project of Martin Krafft that he started in 2007. He did some presentations about it that you can find on the dev website.

The project proposal was introduced by the mentor. The work was mainly about completing the roadmap items for version 1.0. Most of the design was done and code fleshed out.

The stated goal was to have netconf ready for lenny. Martin noted that due to lack of regular free time, he couldn’t reach that goal by himself.

Student

Jonathan Roes was a computer science graduate student from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He had programming experience as a hobby for a long time and wrote some free games and libraries for the Nintendo DS and some proprietary webapps.

He submitted a few little patches in mid-march right after the publication of accepted mentoring organizations and went on to work from mid-may to mid-august. He wrote a lot of code right into the trunk since the whole project was a prototype.

Result

The last commit by Jonathan was also the last to date in the main netconf git repository. No further progress has been made and obviously netconf didn’t get into lenny.

I couldn’t find any further public involvement of Jonathan within Debian.

UPDATE: Martin mentions that he’s open to help to continue the project.

The ultimate Debian database, all things Debian in a SQL database

Presentation

“The Ultimate Debian database wants to reunite all Debian data sources in a SQL database”

The project was mentored by Lucas Nussbaum and co-mentored by Stefano Zacchiroli and Marc ‘HE’ Brockschmidt. The project proposal was introduced by Lucas.

Student

Christian ‘Neronus’ Von Essen is.. well, there wasn’t much information readily available on him.

Result

The whole project is coded up and working well with a whole bunch of data sources. There will be a talk at FOSDEM about this so I’ll leave it to Lucas to talk about it in detail.

I couldn’t find any further public involvement of Christian within Debian.

Security-beta, a beta testing for Debian security updates

Presentation

“The task is to improve the quality assurance process for security updates by providing a public security update beta test program in addition to the existing QA done for security updates. During the preparation of security updates, there’s an inherent delay between the initial upload of the fixed packages and the time until the packages have been built on porter machines. This time gap will be used for a new security update beta program.”

The project was supposed to be mentored by Moritz Mühlenhoff.

Student

The project was supposed to be done by Nico ‘Nion’ Golde. He is studying computer sciences at the Technical University of Berlin. He’s also a DD.

Result

There’s no nothing. Nico, what happened ? And obviously, he’s still developing for Debian.

UPDATE: Nico retracted for personnal reasons before the beginning of the Summer of Code. His slot was reassigned to another student.

Debgraph, a generic infrastructure for the development of packages management tools

Presentation

“In a large software ecosystem such as Debian Linux, there is the potential for dependencies among software packages to create complex management and technical problems. For example, dependency loops (cycles) in which a package directly or indirectly depends on itself can confuse package management tools as they determine the proper order of package installation. debgraph helps developers to solve this problem by enabling generic queries (e.g., “Give me all the nodes that depend on package X”) against the graph of packages and thus automating much of the manual labor that is typically involved in resolving dependency problems.”

The project was mentored by Robert Lemmen, who introduced the project proposal. The project was already started and the C++ code foundation was done by the time it was proposed.

Student

The project was executed by Adam Jensen, research assistant in the Software Engineering and Network Systems Laboratory at Michigan State University.

Result

Adam maintained a blog about his progress and finished ahead of schedule. However, the resulting work seems to be unused, which is a pity since the code could be used within other programs (package managers?).

I couldn’t find any further public involvement of Adam within Debian.

UPDATE: Robert notes that Adam did a great job within the project but a lot remains to be done. Although the last months have been very quiet, he expects to pick up shortly when he has more time.

That’s all for now. The information is quite fragmented I admit. Most of it was pulled from Google, mailing lists, commit logs, blogs, whatever. If some projects are lacking in information here, it’s because I couldn’t find it readily (which is an issue in itself!).

In my next post, I’ll try to analyze the success and failures to extract some insight. Teaser: pet projects!

If you’re a student or a mentor mentioned above, feel free to fill any of the blanks in my report. It’s much appreciated. You’re not a student or mentor mentioned above and have an opinion on how to improve the next Debian Summer of Code ? Feel free to comment.

Sledge, ping!

Here’s a list of projects to be described in my next posts:

• Debian NAS, improve support of Debian on NAS devices
• Cran2deb, generate Debian packages from R packages
• Mergemaster, interactively merge changes in configuration files
• PAS NSS Debian Installer, improve support of PAM and NSS at install-time
• Jigdo-ivory, a JavaScript Jigdo client
• Aptitude-gtk, usability and GTK+ GUI for the Aptitude package manager
• Lintian for fuller automated setups
• Debexpo, a generic web-based package repository

UPDATE: I added some informations I received since.

Are you ?

I was also entertaining the idea of giving a lightning talk in the Debian room (not as part of the general lightning talks) about aptitude-gtk. I certainly don’t feel like talking for a whole hour talk or what. I don’t have that much interesting stuff to say. Maybe we could do it with other 2008 european GSoCers. That could be useful as we didn’t do much publicity-wise (see) in a timely maneer.

Certainly I should write a mail about that to the soc-coordination list about this or ramble about it on the planet. Oh, I’ll get around it.

So any Debian GSoCers going to FOSDEM ?

Long time no post. Anyway, I have some good news.

The Gtk code for Aptitude has been merged some time ago into the main development trunk and we now have a release in Experimental.

For those that don’t know about it, here’s what it’s all about : “The new frontend is is an effort to bring some of the design principles of the curses frontend to a GUI environment, while also exploiting the unique features a GUI gives us and exploring ways to deal with changes in the environment in the nine years since aptitude was first designed.”

I had a very good time this summer working on Aptitude with Daniel Burrows in the Google Summer of Code program and I’m very glad we now have a real release. This version is by no means final or perfect but it’s a good start.

Head for the blog post from Daniel for some other informations : [Daniel Burrows]

I’ll be in Great Britain next week. I’ll come to the Debian Party 2008 in Cambridge on Saturday 23rd August and will be back to London to visit ’till Wednesday 27th August. I’m staying by myself in a nice little hotel in Bloomsbury.

It will be very interesting to meet Debian people and probably do some pitching for my Aptitude GTK project which is making nice progress.

I’ve never been to London before. In fact, I’ve been once when very young and all that I can remember is that the hot dogs seemed nice . I’m currently reading the Lonely Planet book about London and filling my program. Hi, London!