[Soc-coordination] GSoC projects in Python

[Ansgar Burchardt]

Hi,

Manish Gill writes:
> I've been looking at Debian's GSoC projects page and am very interested
> in participating as a student for a Python-related project.
>
> The two that interest me very much are:
>
>     1. Test suite for Debian's archive management software (dak): I've
> done testing before, but never worked focused on it exclusively, so this
> project seems very interesting. I've cloned the git repo and will be
> going through the codebase, learning how the system works.

Thanks for your interest.

There is a short installation guide in setup/README in the Git
repository, however it assumes that you already know a bit how packages
in Debian work. If you don't do so yet, there are at least two more
things you need to know about: generating PGP keys with gnupg and
building a simple Debian package.

You can generate keys with "gpg --gen-key" and later list them with "gpg
--list-keys" which will also include the key id.

The README also asks for a keyring. You can use a copy of
~/.gnupg/pubring.gpg there.

For building packages, you can take an existing one (for example
"hello-debhelper") and rebuild it following these steps:

----
1) Add a <deb-src> line for your current release to your sources.list
2) as root:
   $ aptitude update
   $ aptitude install build-essential devscripts fakeroot
   $ aptitude -R build-dep packagename
3) as any user:
   $ apt-get source packagename
   $ cd packagename-version/
     # ask me about <debian/rules>
   $ dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us
Ask me about <debian/rules>, <nocheck>, <nostrip>, <apt-get source>.
----

This is a slightly modified factoid from the dpkg bot in the #debian
channel on IRC. If you are in #debian, you can open a query to the bot
and mention any of the <words>. (The factoid I used above is "package
recompile".)

There is one more step before you can feed the package to "dak
process-upload": it needs to be signed. You can do so using
  $ debsign -k<keyid> *.changes
debsign is included in the devscripts package.

Feel free to ask if there's anything you don't understand or something
doesn't work. It's quite a lot of stuff to grasp.

Ansgar