[Freedombox-discuss] Outreachy 15 Participation

Johannes Keyser johanneskeyser at posteo.de
Sat Sep 9 17:53:22 UTC 2017


Dear Bhavya Lahari,

great that you're interested in FreedomBox, your help would be very
welcome. I'm unfamiliar with Outreachy and a newcomer to the project
myself, so please take my opinions as what they are: Just my opinions
:). Surely more (qualified) people will also reply soon.

Maybe you're aware that a few Plinth developers are also from IIT,
Hyderabad? Maybe you could even meet in person for some on-boarding.

Note that there might be some controversy about your proposed project:
adding a web-text-editor for configuration editing. First, I think it
might be too simple/short for 3 months full-time (that's what 1min of
checking what Outreachy is suggested to me).
Second, more importantly, direct editing of config files is exactly what
Plinth is designed to avoid. The target audience of FreedomBox is
defined to be uninformed about configuration files. And people who know
how to edit config files do not need a web-interface for it, strictly
speaking. So I only see a bit of convenience for advanced users, who
already know what they're doing. Less obvious, the long-term goal is
indeed to not edit any configuration file directly, to enable automatic
upgrades while complying with Debian policy (that's a longer, unsolved
story.)
All that being said, I get why it seems a nice project. But honestly I'm
afraid it would be distracting from the project's goals, and your time
might be better spend with another project - especially since you're
familiar with Django already.

So I guess my overall question is: Would you also be open for other
project ideas? (For example, my current personal pet peeve is
integration of Let's Encrypt certificates with other services, like
ejabberd, matrix-synapse, etc.) And there are tons of other open issues;
another random thought is adding a general notification system, which to
me would better fit your expertise and 3-month-full-time internship
format..?

Sorry for the wall of text, hope others chime in soon.
Best,
Johannes


On 09/08/2017 09:00 PM, Pratinav Reddy wrote:
> Greetings to everyone,
> 
> 
> I am Bhavya Lahari, third-year student from International Institute of
> Information Technology, Hyderabad. I am interested in Open Source and
> would like to participate in Outreachy and take this as an opportunity
> to get into Open Source.
> 
> 
> I have installed Plinth https://github.com/freedombox/plinth
> <https://github.com/freedombox/plinth> on my local system (Ubuntu) using
> vagrant, and successfully able to run it on my local system.
> 
> 
> I would like to pick project: Add a Text Editor for Plinth to edit
> configuration files
> 
> I am experienced with Python, Django and would like to contribute to
> Debian/FreedomBox.
> 
> 
> Thank You
> 
> Bhavya Lahari
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Freedombox-discuss mailing list
> Freedombox-discuss at lists.alioth.debian.org
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
> 

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