[Soc-coordination] Project Idea fot GSoC

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi José,

Thanks for your email about this

The most critical thing for you now is to find a mentor - if the Debian
GSoC admins agree, the mentor could be somebody employed in your
campus.  Every project proposed to Google needs to have both a mentor
and a student.

On the problem and solution you describe:

- one of my projects is remotely similar but not really the same thing
(recursively building Java dependencies from source)

- I've heard of big corporations using Ganglia (it is open source) as
part of a strategy to find spare CPU cycles where they could run HPC
tasks and also to measure the impact of those tasks on the machines
concerned.  You may be able to use Ganglia in a similar way to support
your distributed builds.  E.g. you could create a "logged_in_users"
metric and when it goes down to 0, you use the person's machine.

- there is some interest in automated rebuilds of full dependency
hierarchies every time a dependency changes.  The existing buildd
servers may not be able to cope with that extra workload and a
distributed solution may be helpful.

- there are issues of trust when building official packages for the
official Debian catalog - building on shared machines increases risk. 
Then again, given that DDs are trusted to build packages on their local
machines, maybe spare clock cycles volunteered by DDs could also be
trusted for rebuilds of official packages.

These are all good topics for discussion on debian-devel too - you may
also find a mentor there

Regards,

Daniel


On 17/03/14 14:29, José Luis Sanroma Tato wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> My name is José Luis Sanroma Tato and I am finishing my MSc in
> computer Engineering. I heard about the Google Summer of Code the last
> week.
>
> I don't know if it is possible to propose a project and this is the
> reason I am writing to this mailing list.
>
> Currently I am working on my Master thesis that I expect to present in
> June, and I think that maybe is a good starting point to develop a
> bigger project because there will be still problems to solve (adding
> architectures, issues with repositories,...).
>
> I am working on a highly scalable and opportunistic architecture to
> build Debian packages for different architectures automatically taking
> care of the dependencies, this project also takes part of the VIII
> Free Software University Competition in Spain[1].
>
> At first appearance it looks like "buildd" but it's different because
> it covers different needs.
>
> I am part of the ARCO research group[2] where we use Debian and we
> have our own debian repository[3] where we build and serve our debian
> packages. We use the computer of the workers to build the packages.
> The problems that we have are:
>
>  *
>
>     We don't have a dedicated infrastructure to build software.
>
>  *
>
>     Furthermore, we don't know when a computer will be available to
>     build the packages due to the employees schedule.
>
>  *
>
>     We have some special needs, for instance, we usually work with the
>     Zeroc Ice middleware, which version 3.5[4] is not part of the
>     debian "stable" distribution and we need to build it for "stable".
>
>
> My project tries to solves all these points by setting up a
> distributed system in which each node is compound by computers with
> some virtual machines as isolated and updated environments. This
> isolated environments are used to build, sign and upload the packages
> to the repository. I can go more into details if you want.
>
> There will be some work to do, solving problems with repositories,
> also adding more architectures (right now only amd64 and i386 are
> supported)...
>
> I am not even a debian maintainer so I don't know if this project
> could be useful in Debian somehow or if someone would be interested in
> mentoring something like this to set new objectives.
>
>
> Regards,
> José Luis Sanroma
>
> [1] http://www.concursosoftwarelibre.org/1314/proyectos/19
>
> [2] https://arco.esi.uclm.es/en
>
> [3] http://babel.esi.uclm.es/debian/
>
> [4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/z/zeroc-ice.html
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Soc-coordination mailing list
> Soc-coordination at lists.alioth.debian.org
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination

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