[Soc-coordination] Project Idea fot GSoC

Mon Mar 17 16:50:26 UTC 2014

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your comments. The item number 4 describes one of the uses of my
project. :)

I will write then in the debian-devel list.

Regards,
José Luis Sanroma

2014-03-17 14:52 GMT+01:00 Daniel Pocock <daniel at pocock.com.au>:

>
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
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