GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2012

Debian Project

Web Page: http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2012/Projects

Mailing List: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination

The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. 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" .

Projects

  • Bootstrappable Debian This is a project to break build dependency cycles in Debian by modifying packages to support staged bootstrap builds.
  • Clang support for build services This project is about extension of the Debian infrastructure. The key idea is to have an alternative way to build packages and easily switch between clang and gcc/g++.
  • Improve debian-installer network setup The debian-installer already provides a component to configure the network during installation. But this component lacks several important features. The goal of the project is to integrate new functionality while keeping things simple and easy for the most common cases.
  • Improving Debian Team Activity Metrics A web interface and an API needs to be designed to present the data gathered by the team metrics project.
  • improving the online package review interface for mentors.debian.net the project is to overhaul the actual interface of mentors.debian.net and adding few features and combine services to make it newcomers-friendly
  • multi-archive support for dak Add multi-archive support to Debian's archive software (dak)
  • Multiarch Cross-Toolchains Make sure existing cross-toolchains actually work on multi-arch systems and produce multiarch-compliant binaries, then switch from dpkg-cross dependencies to cross-arch dependencies.
  • Pluggable Acquire-System for APT The project aims to unify the various metadata acquiring backends of different package management tools in Debian. The expected result is a robust, extensible and performant system, capable of handling both current and forthcoming package metadata.
  • Port bootstrap build-ordering tool A tool will be developed which can solve cyclic build dependencies using staged build information and then output a build order in which packages have to be built to end up with the desired set of packages. This tool will thus allow the automation of bootstrapping Debian on new architectures. To keep the number of packages that have to be able to be cross compiled small, it will also determine the minimal set of packages that is necessary to switch over to native compilation on the new target. It will also help to check the archive for cyclic build dependencies that can not be resolved by staged build information and gives hints to the developers which packages could be modified to remedy the situation and how.
  • Provide an alternative to libstdc++ with libc++ Aim of this project is porting and packaging LLVM project libc++ for providing it as standard C++ library instead of GNU libstdc++ with saved binary compatibility, on some platforms, and allow users switch easy between those libraries.
  • PyPi to Debian repository converter The project goal is to write a tool for automatic conversion of PyPi repository to (unofficial) Debian repository.
  • Semantic Package Review Interface for mentors.debian.net Using automatic metadata extraction from packages and learning algorithms, this project aims to match prospective maintainers with potential sponsors more easily and quickly. An efficient Web interface will be developed, so that maintainers and sponsors can access and improve the semantic data.