Re: [gentoo-dev] GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[Gerion Entrup <gerion.entrup@flump.de>]

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Am Sonntag, 2. Februar 2020, 12:47:55 CET schrieb Benda Xu:
> Dear Fellows,
> 
> alicef <alicef@gentoo.org> writes:
> 
> > As always, Gentoo plans to participate in the Google Summer of Code
> > 2020. We are looking for new project ideas and are always open for
> > new mentors.
> > Google Summer of Code is a big opportunity for making Gentoo project more
> > visible and get more people interested to join Gentoo and helping out.
> >
> > [...]
> 
> This year's GSoC organization application deadline is on Feb 5.  The
> more project ideas, the better Gentoo will show itself to be prepared.
> If you have been thinking of adding projects to our GSoC 2020 list, this
> is a good chance to do so.
> 
> Cheers,
> Benda
> 

Hi,

I saw the idea „Big Data Infrastructure by Gentoo“ and found it kind of
interesting. However, I have a little bit the fear that a full automation
won't be possible and the whole project becomes a little bit like g-sorcery
(gs-pypi, gs-elpa) or g-octave: a really cool project but not used at a
large scale.

What do you think of the idea to not do this fully automated but supervised
by a maintainer? With that I mean an ebuild generator that generates only
the parts of the ebuild that it can easily parse and then present the ebuild
draft to a maintainer who completes it to an full ebuild. As far a I know no
tool like this exists. I think the focus shift helps a lot:
Developing a tool for the Gentoo maintainer not the Gentoo user.

I'm only "maintaining" an overlay so maybe I'm  missing experience
but I often have wished a tool that automatically parses the language specific
packaging files and is able to generate a primitive ebuild out of that.
Maybe it even can do this in an interactive way:
"Hey, upstream needs the dependency 'foo'. In the Gentoo packages I have found
'dev-bar/foo' and 'dev-util/foo'. What is the correct one?"

With a not fully automatic tool also packages can be parsed that are not
in a complete closed ecosystem, like a 'meson.build' file or cmake files for
C++/C programs. But of course package databases like Maven/Cargo/Pypi are
also candidates.

Unfortunately, I have no time currently to participate in the GSOC. I just
want to mention this here as an idea. Please comment or correct me, if
such a tool already exists.

Best,
Gerion


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