Looking for a Google Summer of Code Mentor

[Alex Lieflander]

Hi Michael,

I think it relates to Debian for two reasons:

1. I intend to use this project to learn how to contribute to Debian specifically

I plan to create and contribute to several other Debian projects, and I think working on this project will be the best way for me to learn. Either way I’m going to figure out the submission process and dput, Lintian, debconf, etc; but it would be cool to have access to the additional structure and resources provided by GSoC.

2. I intend to maximize performance and integration with Debian specifically

While I hope this project will be used on all distributions, my current goal is for it to perform optimally on Debian, even at the expense of optimal performance on other distributions. For example, the specific weight values of each priority class will probably need a lot of tuning, and I plan to do that for various Debian configurations (i.e. server, graphical desktop, graphical laptop, etc).

I might have misunderstood the goal of GSoC.

Thanks,
Alex

> On Jan 19, 2024, at 11:09 AM, Michael Biebl wrote:
> 
> Hi Alex,
> 
> thanks for your interest in Debian and systemd!
> 
> Reading through your proposal, I somehow miss the connection to Debian i.e. why this is best sponsored as a Debian specific project.
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something, but to me, this looks more like a project that should be sponsored by the systemd upstream project.
> In the past, systemd upstream has participated in Outreachy.
> Maybe they'd be willing to join GsoC as s well.
> 
> Regards,
> Michael
> 
> 
> Am 18.01.24 um 17:31 schrieb Alex Lieflander:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I haven’t contributed to Debian before, but I recently read about Google Summer of Code and I’d love to participate. I’m trying to create a Debian-specific package which heavily relies on systemd and integrates with existing features. It seems that in order to submit my proposal for consideration I need a Debian developer to agree to mentor that project, and I’m wondering whether anyone on this mailing list would be interested. I haven’t written a proposal yet, but here’s a brief description of the project:
>> 
>> It’s called “Simple Slices”, and the goal is to make prioritized resource distribution more accessible to regular users by providing a small number of pre-configured systemd slices with different priorities; instead of a user specifying “nice” and “ionice" or CPUWeight and IOWeight values (and knowing what those mean), they specify a human-readable priority class like “medium-high".
>> 
>> By doing this via slices, systemd services and scopes can be given that priority class across reboots just by specifying the Slice directive via a drop-in config file. That could easily be done by a user-friendly application or as an overridable default specified by Debian, and because many DEs (at least KDE) launch graphical applications in systemd scopes, graphical applications could also be given a persistent priority level. There are several other really cool things about this project, and I’d be happy to provide additional information or answer any questions.
>> 
>> If anyone would be interested in mentoring this project or just contributing, please let me know.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Alex Lieflander