[Fink-devel] GSOC 2011?

[Alexander Strange]

The deadline for applying to Google Summer of Code as an organization is March 
11. Has anyone thought of applying for Fink?

I can think of several projects that could make package maintenance easier and 
more reliable, but are missing manpower at the moment; e.g.:

- automatic BuildDepends
- updating dpkg and co.
- fixing "Could not resolve inconsistent dependencies"

We would still need people to be project mentors; in my experience GSOC 
projects tend to fail if you don't stay in close contact with the students.
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Re: [Fink-devel] GSOC 2011?

[Sjors Gielen]

Op 28 feb 2011, om 20:41 heeft Alexander Strange het volgende geschreven:

> - updating dpkg and co.

This is done, apart from some 'minor issues'. It would not be a good candidate 
for a complete GSoC project.

As for the others: I don't think they are appropriate for a student, as they 
are pretty much core issues and require quite some knowledge about the Fink 
core in order to solve well. (But we might as well give them a try.)

Sjors

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Re: [Fink-devel] GSOC 2011?

[Max Horn]

Am 28.02.2011 um 20:41 schrieb Alexander Strange:

> The deadline for applying to Google Summer of Code as an organization is 
> March 11. Has anyone thought of applying for Fink?
> 
> I can think of several projects that could make package maintenance easier 
> and more reliable, but are missing manpower at the moment; e.g.:
> 
> - automatic BuildDepends
> - updating dpkg and co.
> - fixing "Could not resolve inconsistent dependencies"
> 
> We would still need people to be project mentors; in my experience GSOC 
> projects tend to fail if you don't stay in close contact with the students.


I think it would be great if Fink participated in GSoC, and I think there is an 
abundance of possible projects for students; the main problem, IMHO, will be to 
find people who have the time and knowledge required to act as mentor. I was 
myself project org and mentor for ScummVM in 2007-2010, and while it's a great 
fun & rewarding endeavor, it also requires quite some work and dedication from 
all involved parties. IMHO.

As to projects: Here are some ideas that might serve as basis for full tasks. 
Some might be merged together into a "improve many things in Fink" task. 
Whatever :). For ScummVM, collecting all tasks on a Wiki page was very helpful 
in the past, see here: 

* Look through our Feature request tracker: 

Some selected examples:
** Detect firewall settings directly from the system prefs; if ProxyFTP / 
ProxyHTTP is set to "auto", then the system prefs are used. See e.g. here 

** check whether a package can be safely moved to stable: 

** Use sandboxing for builds: 


* Improve the PDB further. Many things spring to mind, I believe. We also have 
some old FRs on this:



* Improve the .info format further
  E.g. it would be nice if one could annotate the dependency fields with 
comments. This would allow adding an explanation
  to every dependency, where it comes from. That should be quite easy to code, 
actually.

* Add launchd support? Alternatively, improve deamonic to support launchd (I 
don't know what our status in this regard is, actually)

* Port Fink to use aptitude ? (might be too big, and maybe not what we want)
Or more generally, catch up with some of the improvements made to the Debian 
tools in the past decade, e.g.
- the ability to use "~" in versions (requires new dpkg and apt-get, the Perl 
code require is trivial and done)
- tracking why a package was installed: Explicitly by the user, or as a 
dependency; this affects auto-removal of packages which are no longer needed, 
and affects how dependencies are affected when upgrading a package
- ... tons more ...

* Often one wants to install package "A", and is prompted to install a ton of 
other packages, which are only indirect dependencies of the original package. 
AT least for package maintainers, it would be very helpful to quickly track 
down where all those indirect dependencies come from. E.g. I just wanted to 
install "gmime24", and it asked me to install several dozen, sometimes big, 
packages. Since gmime24 itself is a relatively small and trivial thing, this 
confused me. In this case, I quickly discovered that mono / gtk-sharp were the 
culprits (they are deps of gmime24, used to build some C# language bindings. 
Coincidentally, I think it would be nice if the gmime24 package was split, 
moving those language bindings into a separate package, but I digress ;)
One would have to determine what exaxtly the command should do, how the output 
might look, etc.; part of that would be our job (creating the task 
description), part would be the student's (helped by the mentor(s)).

* Oftentimes, students have surprising ideas of their own... so be open :)



As I see it, ideas for improving Fink, even in student suitable chunks, is not 
the problem; the problem is describing these well, and then mentoring the 
student.

Cheers,
Max
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Re: [Fink-devel] GSOC 2011?

[Daniel Macks]

On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 18:49:24  0100, Max Horn  wrote:
>
  > * Improve the .info format further
  >   E.g. it would be nice if one could annotate the dependency fields 
with comments. This would allow adding an explanation
  >   to every dependency, where it comes from. That should be quite 
easy to code, actually. 
 
It actually wouldn't take any coding at all, since I think it's already done. 
 
2005-08-31  Dave Vasilevsky  

    * PkgVersion.pm: Add convenience method to get just one PkgVersion from
    a .info file. 
    * PkgVersion.pm, Validation.pm, FinkVersion.pm.in: Info3 enhancements
    for pkglist fields:
        - Normalize whitespace
        - Allow comments (# to end of line)
        - Remove trailing comma

dan
 
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  dma...@netspace.org

 
 


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Re: [Fink-devel] GSOC 2011?

[Alexander Hansen]

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On 3/1/11 12:49 PM, Max Horn wrote:
> 



> * Add launchd support? Alternatively, improve deamonic to support launchd (I 
> don't know what our status in this regard is, actually)
> 
Minimal.  dbus uses it, but there's not a standard frameork to do so.

Daniel Johnson looked at daemondo, but I don't know how far that has
progressed.

> * Port Fink to use aptitude ? (might be too big, and maybe not what we want)

We had aptitude for a while.  It broke on 10.4.




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Alexander Hansen, Ph.D.
Fink User Liaison
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