[Freedombox-discuss] GSoC 2021 application interest

[Carlos Henrique Lima Melara]

Hello, all.

I'm Carlos (a.k.a. Charles) and I was introduced to FreedomBox around
2019 (or 2018) by a talk in the Debconf. Since then I've been following
the development of FreedomBox (maybe a little too distant) and watched
last year's Debconf video too.

I was very happy when I saw the participation of FreedomBox in this year
GSoC because I think that maybe I can contribute and come closer to the
project. Also, I've always wanted to setup a local mail service to use,
but never had the time or the incentive, so this might be my chance.

The first step before contacting you was to see if I could get familiar
with the technology stack used (mainly django and of course FreedomBox/plinth).
So to start, I did the Django tutorial [1] and read about python packaging
[3]. The final product of the tutorial is available at [2]. Then I moved
to the FreedomBox tutorial [4] on how to build an app. It's based on the
transmission debian package, but I did it for msmtp already because it was
a proposed alternative and I was familiar with it (I use it myself with
neomutt to connect to outlook). For that, I've forked from the Salsa
FreedomBox repo and started a new "msmtp" branch on my namespace [5]. I
already have a Salsa account because I'm a contributor to Debian through
package maintenance [6]. I've set up the container and did a little
digging, then I followed the FreedomBox app tutorial for msmtp.

The app does set msmtp and sends email through a test account I've setup
(though outlook didn't seem to like the test emails and blocked it). It's
a little rough app in the sense that I didn't set an option in the app's
page to change the msmtp configuration, but if you think it's a good idea
I'll do that.

I did look too in the issue #56 in Salsa about the past mta efforts. It
seems like a very straight foward plan, though I've seen also some comments
pointing out that exim could be a viable alternative since it's the default
mta in debian and as far as the systemd container goes it's already installed.

Well, I think this email have grown a little too much. I'd like to hear your
opinion on the work I did and possibly in the candidacy of GSoC 2021.
Disclaimer: I'm not very familiar with IRC, so a TLDR on the good manners
would be appreciated for me to join the Freedombox channel.

Cheers,
Charles

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/intro/tutorial0{1,2,3,4,5,6,7}
[2] https://gitlab.com/charles2910/django-tutorial
[3] https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/modules.html#tut-packages
[4] https://docs.freedombox.org/tutorial/index.html
[5] https://salsa.debian.org/charles/freedombox/-/tree/msmtp
[6] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=charlesmelara%40outlook.com