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Welcome to our 2011 Debian Google Summer of Code students!

April 26th, 2011

The Debian project is proud to announce that it has again been chosen as Mentoring organization for this year's Google Summer of Code. This year nine students have been accepted and will be sponsored by Google during their summer vacation to work on a specific task for a mentoring project.

They should soon be posting to report their progress on Debian's blog aggregator Planet Debian and you're welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org.

Further details will be posted in the coming days on the related wiki page.

The following projects have been accepted:

Automated multi-Arch Cross-Building and Bootstrapping

by Gustavo Prado Alkmim, mentored by Wookey

Enable easy and automated setup of cross-platform automated build systems and bootstrapping for QA in the Multi-Arch era. This involves the creation of multi-stage bootstrap build sequencing tools and a reliable automated multi-arch cross-builder.

APT/dpkg Transaction Ordering for Safety and Performance

by Chris Baines, mentored by Michael Vogt

The ordering code in libapt is responsible for ordering the unpacking/configuration of debs so as to ensure dependencies are satisfied etc. Currently it organizes the ordering into big batches. This project further implements an ordering satisfying more constrains such as minimal amounts of dpkg invocations, minimal amount of broken packages at any point.

Debdelta APT Native Integration

by Ishan Jayawardena, mentored by Michael Vogt

Improve user experience of APT and its front-ends by speeding up the upgrade process. This provides a better framework for unified handling of debdelta and future APT improvements such as parallelism. Support for stable and security upgrades as well as multiple APT related libraries is expected.

Dpkg Declarative Diversions

by Sam Dunne, mentored by Steve Langasek

The dpkg-divert command should be replaced with a new control file with a declarative syntax which dpkg will parse and process directly as part of the package unpack and removal phases, eliminating the problems resulting from non-atomic handling of diversions.

Backend Tools and Infrastructure for DEX

by Nathan Handler, mentored by Matt Zimmerman

DEX is a new program designed to help improve Debian and its derivatives by merging in changes made downstream and encouraging discussions between the various projects. As this is a new project, most of the infrastructure does not exist (or is rather hackish and incomplete). This project will create the necessary backend tools and infrastructure so that all Debian derivatives can easily make use of the DEX project.

Jigsaw Modularized Java in Debian

by Guillaume Mazoyer, mentored by Tom Marble

The Java Development Kit (JDK) is a big monolithic software tool: many of its features are only useful in limited areas (GUI toolkits are useless for a web server). This project will bring the Jigsaw modular JDK to Debian, helping performance (start-up, size, etc) but also the dependency resolution (to match Debian packaging). Some work exists upstream does not fit with Debian. This project will package the current development version of Jigsaw, update Debian Java Policy, and create the necessary packaging tools for software depending on it.

Python Multi-Build for Python Extensions Packaging

by Mesutcan Kurt, mentored by Piotr Ożarowski

This project creates a tool to build Python extensions for all Python versions supported by Debian at the time. The project should detect the upstream build system and testing frameworks and use them. It will be interfaced with CDBS and the dh sequencer, replacing their Python snippets.

Debian Teams Activity Metrics

by Sukhbir Singh, mentored by Andreas Tille

This project will gauge the performance of teams in Debian by measuring metrics such as: postings on relevant mailing lists, package upload records from the Ultimate Debian Database and commit statistics from project repositories... The information gathered will help in evaluating team performance by measuring how people in a team are working together. An interface to access this information easily will also be developed.

Compute Clusters Integration for Debian Development and Building

by Rudy Godoy, mentored by Steffen Moeller

The project's main goal is to enable developers to easily use compute clusters (Eucalyptus, OpenStack...) as environments for arch-specific development by providing a set of tools they can use to setup and run an extended platform for their development, testing and building tasks.

About Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a global program where university students are given a stipend to write code for open source projects over a three month period. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted students are paired with a mentor from the participating projects, gaining exposure to real-world software development and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.