[Soc-coordination] Project Idea fot GSoC

Thu Mar 20 22:15:30 UTC 2014

Hello again,

I found a mentor and I have almost everything ready. Should the mentor
creates the project in the wiki or should be myself?

Regards,
José Luis

2014-03-17 17:50 GMT+01:00 José Luis Sanroma Tato <
josel.sanromatato at gmail.com>:

> 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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