Debian is participating in the 2008 Google Summer of Code
April 27th, 2008
The Debian project is proud to announce that it has again been accepted by
Google as a mentor organisation for the Summer of Code programme. We have been
allocated twelve tasks for this year. Google will fund the students mentioned
here to work full time on those tasks during their summer vacation, from May
26th to August 18th. They will be guided and evaluated during this time by a
team of Debian developers.
Several tasks cover communication between software authors, users and Debian
developers. A number of tasks target quality assurance and improved testing,
while others will result in new tools that help maintain Debian systems.
- Jonathan Roes will work on Netconf, a next generation approach for
network configuration management on Linux systems. This will provide a single
logical replacement for a large number of programs currently handling related
tasks on Debian systems.
- CRAN is a comprehensive archive of tools and libraries for the GNU R
statistical computing language. Charles Blundell will write cran2deb, a tool
to help with automatic generation of Debian packages from CRAN packages and
bundles. This makes it much easier for developers and users to work with R
extensions on Debian systems, especially for administrators of larger
computing facilities.
- Nico Golde will improve Debian's quality assurance processes for security
updates by providing a security update beta test facility. This will allow
Debian to test security updates on a broader range of setups prior to public
release and in addition to the existing QA measures.
- Jigdo is a tool developed to help reduce the cost of downloading and
mirroring Debian CD and DVD images. Dustin Rayner's project jigdo-ivory
entails the creation of a browser-based Jigdo client to make downloads much
easier for end users.
- Obey Arthur Liu is planning to create a GTK+ GUI for the package
management tool Aptitude that will work alongside improved ncurses and
command-line interfaces. This will offer a new interface design geared toward
usability and advanced functionality.
- Jonny Lamb will work on debexpo, a web-based Debian package repository to
allow everyone to upload and provide personal package repositories. It
includes functionality for sponsors to easily review packages and should ease
contribution to Debian by offering an easy way to contribute packages for
software not yet included in Debian.
- Christian von Essen will be developing the
Ultimate Debian
Database
, a large relational database that will collect together the
project's important information into one central easy-to-use system including
bugs, build information, developer information, etc.
- Adam Jensen will create debgraph, an infrastructure to process package
inter-dependencies and similar data using a generic graph interface. Many
applications such as package managers already use some of this functionality,
but this project will be the first common code to support more complex
queries, allowing developers of other tools to concentrate on higher-level
issues.
- Per Andersson plans to work on improving Debians support for consumer
market NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. These popular devices are tiny
files servers, often equipped with ARM processors and running an embedded
Linux. This project will make it easier to install and customize Debian on
these devices and further increase Debians popularity in the embedded Linux
market.
- Lintian is an automated package checking tool used for quality assurance,
able to detect all kinds of common errors and mistakes in Debian packages.
Jordà Polo Bardés will enhance the diagnosis functionality in lintian,
especially with respect to handling the severity and accuracy of such tests,
to make it more usable in automated setups where low-importance test and
false positives may cause issues.
- Max Wiehle is going to add support for automatically merging
configuration files on system upgrades. At the moment, Debian's package
management tools currently just keep track of old and new configurations as
upgrades take place, so this new work will make life much easier for system
administrators.
- Juan Luis Belmonte Mendez will be writing a new tool to help configure
PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) and NSS (Name Service Switch) through
the Debian Installer. This should allow for much easier configuration of
Debian machines to use common network based authentication systems like LDAP
and Active Directory.
We welcome them to our vibrant developer community and encourage all of our
teams and contributors to support and help them to succeed with their tasks.
Debian's tasks are listed in our wiki at
The Summer of Code is documented on Google's website at
About Debian
The Debian Project is an association of Free Software developers who
volunteer their time and effort in order to produce the completely
free operating system Debian GNU/Linux.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at
http://www.debian.org/ or send mail to
<press@debian.org>.
