[Soc-coordination] Google Summer of Code 2010 Debian Report

[Obey Arthur Liu]

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Hello fellow developers,

The summer is over :( but I'm happy to announce that this year's Summer
of Code at Debian[1] 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[2][4]. 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[3], 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 at 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 at 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!
Obey Arthur Liu

(cross-posted to [4] and soc-coordination at l.a.d.o)

[1] <http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc>
[2] <http://debconf10.debconf.org>
[3]
<http://www.milliways.fr/2009/10/24/debian-at-google-summer-of-code-mentor-summit/>
[4]
<http://www.milliways.fr/2010/09/19/google-summer-of-code-2010-debian-report/>
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