Milliways

Welcome to our 2011 Debian Google Summer of Code students!

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 18:52:00 +0000

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to our new batch of students selected for the 2011 Debian Google Summer of Code!

They should soon be posting on Debian Planet and you’re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org

Further details will be posted in the coming days to our wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc

Automated Multi-Arch Cross-Building and Bootstrapping

aka "autocrossbuild", by Gustavo Prado Alkmim, mentored by Wookey
Enable easy and automated setup of cross-platform automated build systems and bootstrapping for QA in the Multi-Arch era. This involves the creation of multi-stage bootstrap build sequencing tools and a reliable automated multi-arch cross-builder.

APT/Dpkg Transaction Ordering for Safety and Performance

aka "aptordering", by Chris Baines, mentored by Michael Vogt
The ordering code in libapt is responsible for ordering the unpacking/configuration of debs so as to ensure dependencies are satisfied etc. Currently it organizes the ordering into big batches. This project further implements an ordering satisfying more constrains such as "minimal amounts of dpkg invocations", "minimal amount of broken packages at any point".

DebDelta APT Native Integration

aka "debdelta", by Ishan Jayawardena, mentored by Michael Vogt
Improve user experience of APT and its front-ends by speeding up the upgrade process. This provides a better framework for unified handling of debdelta and future APT improvements such as parallelism. Support for stable and security ugprades as well as multiple APT related libraries is expected.

Dpkg Declarative Diversions

aka "declarativediversions", by Sam Dunne, mentored by Steve Langasek
The dpkg-divert command should be replaced with a new control file with a declarative syntax which Dpkg will parse and process directly as part of the package unpack and removal phases, eliminating the problems resulting from non-atomic handling of diversions.

Backend Tools and Infrastructure for DEX

aka "dextools", by Nathan Handler, mentored by Matt Zimmerman
EX is a new program designed to help improve Debian and its derivatives by merging in changes made downstream and encouraging discussions between the various projects. As this is a new project, most of the infrastructure does not exist (or is rather hackish and incomplete). This project will create the necessary backend tools and infrastructure so that all Debian derivatives can easily make use of the DEX project.

Jigsaw Modularized Java in Debian

aka "jigsaw", by Guillaume Mazoyer, mentored by Tom Marble
The Java Development Kit (JDK) is a big monolithic software tool: many of its features are only useful in limited areas (GUI toolkits are useless for a web server). This project will bring the Jigsaw modular JDK to Debian, helping performance (start-up, size, etc) but also the dependency resolution (to match Debian packaging). Some work exists upstream does not fit with Debian. This project will package the current development version of Jigsaw, update Debian Java Policy, and create the necessary packaging tools for software depending on it.

Python Multi-Build for Python Extensions Packaging

aka "pythonmultibuild", by Mesutcan Kurt, mentored by Piotr Ożarowski
This project creates a tool to build Python extensions for all Python versions supported by Debian at the time. The project should detect the upstream build system and testing frameworks and use them. It will be interfaced with CDBS and the dh sequencer, replacing their Python snippets.

Debian Teams Activity Metrics

aka "teammetrics", by Sukhbir Singh, mentored by Andreas Tille
This project will gauge the performance of teams in Debian by measuring metrics such as: postings on relevant mailing lists, package upload records from the Ultimate Debian Database and commit statistics from project repositories... The information gathered will help in evaluating team performance by measuring how people in a team are working together. An interface to access this information easily will also be developed.

Compute Clusters Integration for Debian Development and Building

aka "computeclusters", by Rudy Godoy, mentored by Steffen Möller
The project's main goal is to enable developers to easily use compute clusters (Eucalyptus, OpenStack...) as environments for arch-specific development by providing a set of tools they can use to setup and run an extended platform for their development, testing and building tasks.

Good luck to everyone!

FOSDEM 2011!

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:38:00 +0000

I'm totally coming to FOSDEM this year.

And by the way, since we're talking about IPv6, http://www.milliways.fr is now IPv6-compatible (and you can head to http://www6.milliways.fr for IPv6 only).

Debian & the Google Code-in 2010, requesting tasks

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 22:37:00 +0000

Debian so far had a nice experience with the Google Summer of Code and this year, Google is going to run the Google Code-in. We have applied and would now need some help from you all.
In the words of the official announcement:

"Google Code-in, Google's contest to introduce pre-university students to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software
development possible, is starting on November 22, 2010. Google is inviting students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code,
documentation, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year. These tasks include:

Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code

Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents

Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing

Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality

Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions

Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more

Translation: Tasks related to localization

User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction"

I have applied on behalf of Debian and we now need a series of short tasks (1-2 weeks work) to propose in all these areas.
The selected mentoring organizations will be announced on November 5th 2010.
As you can see, this is an interesting project as the individual tasks are closer in size to an RC bug and encompass a wider range of areas than the Summer of Code.

I set up a welcome page and a tasks page.
Please fill in your tasks ideas ASAP. You can also volunteer to help as admin and/or mentor.
We will be using the usual communication channels used for the Summer of Code:

IRC: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org

ML: soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org

Tripit group for Debian

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 21:27:00 +0000

Hello Planet Debian,

Since everyone seems to like sharing and hearing about travel plans, I took the initiative of creating a Debian group on Tripit*.

To join, you need a @debian.org email and click on: http://www.tripit.com/group/join/debian.

Cheers

*I realize Tripit is not free (as in freedom), but it's not like there are comparable free alternatives.

Google Summer of Code 2010 Debian Report

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 11:02:00 +0000

Hello fellow developers,

The summer is over :( but I'm happy to announce that this year's Summer of Code at Debian has been better than ever! :) This is indeed the 4th time we had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code and each year has been a little different.

This year, 8 of our 10 students succeeded in our (very strict!) final evaluations, but we have reasons to believe that they will translate into more long-term developers than ever, all thank to you.

The highlight this year has been getting almost all of our students at DebConf10. Thanks again this year to generous Travel Grants from the Google Open Source Team, we managed to fly in 7 of our students (up from 3!). You certainly saw them, presenting during DebianDay, hacking on the grass of Columbia, hacking^Wcheering our Debian Project Leader throwing the inaugural pitch of a professional baseball game or hacking^Wsun-tanning on the très kitsch Coney Island beach.

Before I give the keyboard to our Students, I'd like to tell you that it will be the pleasure and honor of Obey Arthur Liu (yours truly, as Administrator) and Bastian Venthur (as Mentor) to represent Debian at the Summer of Code 2010 Mentors Summit on 23-24 October 2010, at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Like last year, we expect many other DDs to be present under other hats. We will be having 2 days of unconference on GSoC and free software related topics. We all look forward to reporting from California on Planet and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o!

All of our students had a wonderful experience, even if they couldn't come to DebConf, that is best shared in their own voice, so without further ado, our successful projects:

Multi-Arch support in APT

by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt

"apt-get install MultiArch" does mostly work now as most code is already merged in squeeze, but if not complain about us at deity@l.d.o! Still, a lot left on the todo list - not only in APT - so let us all add MultiArch again to the Release Goals and work hard on squeezing it into wheezy. :)

Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API

by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur

Hello, I'm David Wendt, and I went to Debconf10 to learn more about the development side of Debian. Having used it since the 9th grade, I've been intimately familiar with many of Debian's internals. However, I wanted to see the developers and other Debian users. At DebConf, I was able to see a variety of talks from Debian and Ubuntu developers. I also got to meet with my mentor as well as the maintainer of Debbugs.

Content-aware Config Files Upgrading

by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont

Config::Model is now capable of manipulating files using shorter and easier to write models. Thanks to that, packagers may start experiment with creating upgrade models. Further work is needed to support more complicated config files - Dominique Dumont is working on DEP-5 parser, I'll shortly start working on a cupsd config file parser.
The best thing about DebConf10 is that every person I talked with knew what I was doing. I had a mission to get some feedback on my project. Everybody liked the idea of making upgrades less cumbersome. On the other side, it was my first visit to United States, so I decided to go on a daytrip on my own (instead of staying inside the building, despite heat warnings). I had a chance to visit many interesting places like Ground Zero, the UN headquarters, Grand Central Terminal, Times square and Rockefeller Center - that was a great experience.

Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer

by Jérémie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault

Debconf10 was great! Among other people working on the installer, I met Aurélien Jarno from the Debian/kFreeBSD team and we worked together on a cross-platform busybox package. Besides, the talks were very interesting and I've filled my TODO-list for the year.
For instance I learned about the Jigsaw project of OpenJDK, and how Debian would be the ideal platform to experiment with it. More generally, some people think Debian could push Java 7 forward and I'd like to see this happen.

Smart Upload Server for FTP Master

by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert

I must say that it was great time for me in NY, I've met and talked and coded with people from ftp-master team like Torsten Werner who helped me to push the project a bit further and with some other people who were looking forward to release of the tool which I hope they will use quite soon. Everybody interested, everybody excited, really cool place and time. And I can't forget the Coney Island beach and stuff, lot of fun, lot of sun;)

Aptitude Qt

by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela

Currently, development branches support full features searching, viewing extended package's informations, performing cache and packages operations. Code and GUI still require a lot of work which will be continued. Informations about further progress could be found on aptitude mailing list and repository rss channel.

Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices

by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin

"For me, DebConf 10 started at the airport, where Sylvestre Ledru (whom I didn't know of before) was wearing a GSoC 2007 t-shirt, that is, given the circumstances, almost equivalent to say "I'm a hacker, I'm going to DebConf 10".
I've spent my time at the conference attending various talks, hacking, meeting DDs and other hackers (amongst others, my co-mentor Per Andersson, Paul Wise, Julien Cristau, Christian Perrier, Cyril Brulebois, Martin Michlmayr, Colin Watson and Otavio Salvadores who I have to thank for his patience while dealing with my questions), chatting, cross-signing keys, rushing to finish eating before 7pm, getting sunburnt, sightseeing (thanks, Arthur, for the lightning-fast tour of Manhattan!), and so on.

Debian Developers and community, we count on you. See you next year!

(cross-posted to debian-devel-announce@l.d.o and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o)

Welcome to our 2010 Debian Google Summer of Code students!

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:17:00 +0000

I'd like to extend a warm welcome to our selected students for the 2010 Debian Google Summer of Code!

They should pop up on Debian Planet soon and you're welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org

Aptitude Qt

by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela

Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE.

Content-aware Config Files Upgrading

by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont

When a package deliver configuration files, the problem of merging user data with new configuration instructions will arise during package upgrades on users systems. Sometimes merging can be done with 3 way merge, but this process does not insure that the resulting file is correct or even legal. This project intends to create standards, tools an heuristics to make the scary config file conflict resolution debconf prompt a thing of the past.

Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API

by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur

Currently debbugs supports a SOAP interface for querying Debian's Bug Tracking System. Unfortunately this operation is read-only. This project would create an API for debbugs which supports sending and manipulating bug reports, without having to resort to email. This project does not intend to replace email as mean to manipulate the BTS but rather to enhance the BTS to allow other means of bug creation and manipulation.

Debian High Performance Computing on Clouds

by Dominique Belhachemi, mentored by Steffen Moeller

The project paves a way to combine the demands in high performance computing with the dynamics of compute clouds with Debian. Combining the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure with the TORQUE resource manager and preparing the components for dynamically added and removed instances provides the user with a attractive high performance computing environment. Such a system allows users to share resources with large compute centers with minimal changes in their workflow and scripts.

Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices

by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin

This project aims to improve the installation experience of Debian on handheld devices by replacing ad-hoc install scripts by a full-blown and adapted Debian-Installer. The Neo FreeRunner is used as it is the most convenient and open device from a development standpoint, but other devices will also be explored.

Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer

by Jérémie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault

The primary means of distributing the Hurd is through Debian GNU/Hurd. However, the installation CDs presently use an ancient, non-native installer. The goal of this project is to port the missing parts of Debian-Installer to Hurd. To achieve this, all problematic Linux-specific code in Debian-Installer will be replaced by less or non-kernel dependent code, paving the way for better support of other non-Linux ports of Debian.

Multi-Arch support in APT

by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt

Hardware like 64bit processors are perfectly able to execute 32bit opcode but until now this potentiality is disregard as the infrastructure tools like dpkg and APT are not able to install and/or solve dependencies across multiple architectures. The project therefore focuses on enabling APT to work out good solutions in a MultiArch aware environments without the need of hacky and partly working biarch packages currently in use.

Package Repository Analysis and Migration Automation

by Ricardo O'Donell, mentored by Neil Williams

Emdebian uses a filter to select packages from the main Debian repositories that are considered useful to embedded devices, excluding the majority of packages. The results of processing the filter are automated but maintaining the filter list is manual. This project seeks to automate certain elements of the filtering process to cope with specific conditions. This project will also generalize to more elaborate and intelligent algorithms to improve the transitions of the main Debian archives.

Smart Upload Server for FTP Master

by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert

Making packages upload smarter, more interactive and painless for uploaders by switching from anonymous FTP and Cron jobs to a robust protocol and modern package checking and processing daemon. This daemon would test early and report early, saving developers time.

More details coming soon on http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc

Congratulations everyone and have a fruitful summer!

Apply for the Google Summer of Code at Debian!

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 20:07:00 +0000

The student application period for the Google Summer of Code has started since March 29th, but there is still time: the deadline is Friday, April 9th at 19:00 UTC.

If you're a student, go check out the Debian Ideas page. Pick an idea you like or suggest your own. Come talk to the Summer of Code team on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org and on the soc-coordination mailing list. Work with us to perfect your proposal before the deadline and hopefully, you'll get your awesome project and your ticket to DebConf10 in New York this summer.

Do you like to tinker ? Do you like having a positive impact on all kinds of users ? The Google Summer of Code at Debian has been a exceptional experience for all our students over these past years and we look forward to welcoming you in this great family to work on the foundations of the Linux experience of millions of users spanning several distributions, from the smallest embedded devices to the largest supercomputers.

So, please take a look at our Ideas page, apply and tell your friends to do so by rebloging, retweeting, reeverything!

Going to DebConf10 and more

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:25:00 +0000

Hi folks,

I am coming to DebConf10!

In addition to New York, I'll also be in San Francisco and Seattle.

And here's my travel plan to go with it:

Day by Day Itinerary

Day 1: Friday, July 9, 2010 (Paris, France)

Depart: Zurich (ZRH), 19:45 CEST, Arrive: Paris (CDG), 21:10 CEST
Air France 5109 - Aircraft Avro RJ85 Avroliner - nonstop 1h, 25m 475 km Class K

Day 3: Sunday, July 11, 2010 (San Francisco, CA)

Depart: Paris (CDG), 10:40 CEST, Arrive: San Francisco (SFO), 12:50 PDT
Air France 84 - Aircraft Boeing 747-400 - nonstop 11h, 10m 8,958 km Class H seat 25A

Day 8: Friday, July 16, 2010 (Seattle, WA)

Depart: San Francisco (SFO), 07:00 PDT, Arrive: Seattle (SEA), 09:00 PDT
Virgin America 740 - Aircraft Airbus A319 - nonstop 2h, 00m 1,090 km

Day 11: Monday, July 19, 2010 (San Francisco, CA)

Depart: Seattle (SEA), 07:00 PDT, Arrive: San Francisco (SFO), 09:15 PDT
Virgin America 751 - Aircraft Airbus A319 - nonstop 2h, 15m 1,090 km

Day 14: Thursday, July 22, 2010 (New York, NY)

Depart: San Francisco (SFO), 23:05 PDT, Arrive: New York (JFK), 07:50 EDT(+1 day)
Virgin America 28 - Aircraft Airbus A320-100/200 - nonstop 5h, 45m 4,150 km

Day 17: Sunday, July 25, 2010 (New York, NY)

DebCamp10!

Day 24-30: Sunday, August 1 to Saturday, August 7, 2010 (New York, NY)

DebConf10!

Day 31: Sunday, August 8, 2010 (Paris, France)

Depart: New York (JFK), 19:05 EDT, Arrive: Paris (CDG), 08:35 CEST(+1 day)
Air France 7 - Aircraft 388 - nonstop 7h, 30m 5,829 km Class V seat 86A

To get an up to date version of my travel plans, visit the TripIt page:

http://www.tripit.com/trip/public/id/4CE972068378

I'm looking forward to getting as many of our Google Summer of Code students as possible at the DebConf.

See you in the US!

Update: Actually, I might attend DebCamp too.

Debian at Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:54:00 +0000

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

DebConf9 travel plan

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:33:00 +0000

My travel plan:

Iberia flight 3477 Zürich-Madrid on July 23rd 11:55-14:05, seat 12F

Renfe train Talgo 194 Madrid/Chamartin-Cáceres on July 23rd 16:25-20:02, seat 5-02A

DebConf9

Renfe train TRD 17021 Cáceres-Madrid/Atocha on July 31st 06:46-10:54, seat 1-025

Renfe train Trenhotel 00335 Cáceres-Madrid/Chamartin on July 31st 05:08-09:03, seat 06D

Iberia flight 3406 Madrid-Paris on July 31st 12:10-14:05, seat TBD

SNCF train Lyria 09211 Paris-Zürich on August 3rd 08:24-13:00, seat TBD

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

PGP/GPG transition 8CA99047 -> 29C0FFEE *

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:12:00 +0000

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.

Zürich, Switzerland for the summer (housing? DebConf?)

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:03:00 +0000

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.

Can I haz apartment

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:

from beginning of June to end of August (I have a friend willing to let me crash in so middle of June is okay)

either one room (for myself) or up to 2 or 3 (I'd be flatsharing then)

about or less than ~1500 CHF for one room, or less than ~2000 CHF for two and ~3000 CHF for three, you got the idea

reasonably close transport-wise from Enge, 20-30 minutes by public transport or, even better bike, would be cool

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.

Can I haz DebConf

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.

Here's my tentative travel plan:
- Swissair flight 2026, 23rd July, Zürich 12:25 - Madrid 14:45
- Renfe train, 23rd July, Madrid 16:40 - Cáceres 20:02
- DebConf!
- Renfe train, 31st July, Cáceres 5:08 - Madrid 9:43

Either:
- Visit Madrid
- Swissair flight 2033, 2nd August, Madrid 19:45 - Zürich 21:55

Or:
- Air France flight 1301, 31st July, Madrid 12:40 - Paris 14:45
- Visit home
- SNCF train TGV Lyria 9217, 2nd August, Paris 17:54 - Zürich 22:26

I'm not decided yet on the last point.

So, any of you coming to DebConf from Zürich ?

Google Summer of Code 2009: Debian's Shortlist

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:20:00 +0000

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.

Google Summer of Code at Debian: Update, need mentors!

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:43:00 +0000

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)

Qt4 Package Manager:

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.

EC2/Eucalyptus:

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.

Google Summer of Code 2009 - we're in!

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:21:00 +0000

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:

the Debian wiki page

the debian-soc mailing list

on IRC (irc.debian.org, #debian-soc)

on twitter (DebianGSoC) or identi.ca (debiangsoc)

Good luck to all involved; may all your code be merged in squeeze!

Summer of Code '09 @ Debian update [updated]

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:08:00 +0000

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

Google Summer of Code 2009 at Debian needs you

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:03:00 +0000

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!

FOSDEM09 and my Summer of Code at Debian slides

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:50:00 +0000

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.

Debian Summer of Code '08 : Where are they now (part 3/3)

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:03:00 +0000

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.

Debian Summer of Code '08 : Where are they now (part 2.5/3)

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 05:16:00 +0000

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.

Debian Summer of Code '08 : Where are they now (part 2/3)

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:16:00 +0000

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.

Debian Summer of Code '08 : Where are they now (part 1/3)

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:16:00 +0000

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.

FOSDEM 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:03:00 +0000

Are you going?

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 ?

Aptitude 0.5.0 (aka Aptitude-gtk) released

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:31:00 +0000

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]

Going to London - Cambridge

noreply@blogger.com (Obey Arthur Liu) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:56:00 +0000

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!

Day	DebConf day 2 (2009-07-25)
Room	Upper talkroom
Start time	10:00
Duration	01:00