Google Summer of Code: Proposals and Mentors

[Nirbheek Chauhan]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 5:23 PM, Sebastian Dröge
<sebastian at centricular.com> wrote:
> On Di, 2015-02-17 at 16:59 +0000, Luis de Bethencourt wrote:
>> GStreamer is going to apply for Google Summer of Code 2015. But we need
>> your help!
>>
>> We would really appreciate if you suggested proposals, volunteered for
>> mentoring, or added content to the proposals.
>>
>> Current list of proposals is here:
>> http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/GSOC/socprojects.html
>
> Does anybody have any other ideas, or would like to be added as a
> potential mentor for any of these projects? Would be great to get some
> more ideas and potential mentors so we can properly handle all
> projects :)
>

It might be useful to have a project to improve Cerbero.

Cerbero's main use-case right now is to build binaries
tarballs/packages from upstream sources. It's quite difficult to use
it for other uses such as local development; which is a shame because
it's currently our best way of doing cross-compilation.

List of deficiencies (Incomplete):
==================================
1) Local development is hard; current best way is to push to a custom
remote/branch
2) Difficult to maintain multiple checkouts of Cerbero (gst 1.4,
master, custom, etc)
3) Downloaded-sources management is suboptimal (no checksums, etc)
4) Built-sources management is supoptimal (mtime is compared, which is
often misleading)
5) No way to "uninstall"/"wipeone" a recipe; need to wipe everything
6) Essentially no documentation about how to use it
7) More![1]

A subset or a superset of these problems can be turned into a GSoC
project. The aim is not to turn Cerbero into a full-fledged package
management system, but something that at least fulfills basic
development requirements such as "don't arbitrarily rebuild everything
ffs". :)

I volunteer myself to mentor/co-mentor this project[2] if we think
it's worth doing.

Cheers,
Nirbheek

1. I'm sure Alessandro has many choice expletives he would love to
share with us on the matter
2. I have experience being a GSoC student and a mentor with the Gentoo project

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan