Re: [gentoo-dev] Six month major project on Gentoo

[Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:06 AM, Gaurav Saxena <grvsaxena419@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
> I am interested in doing my final year computer scence project on gentoo. I
> would be having a duration of six months to work on the project. Could you
> please suggest me some good project ideas that would be helpful to me as
> well as gentoo. I am interested in parallel computing, data structures ,
> operating system. I am well versed in C/C++. I think  there might be
> projects which need to be done, I would like to work on them.

The only idea I can think of for parallel computing / distributed
systems would be at the build level.

distcc-ng, a farm of user-controlled machines that compile your code
in a p2p fashion.
a distributed hash table of input, output tuples (basically .o caching
so users can fetch the .o from the DHT)

Both of these have *massive* trust issues. When random guys on the
internet are compiling your code you have to be very careful about how
you verify and execute that code. When you fetch .o files from a DHT
you have the same problem.

Almost every other problem I can think of at the Gentoo OS level can
fit on a meager sized machine (i.e. it is not a distributed systems
nor a parallel computing problem.)

Many of the annoying parts of Gentoo are merely tools problems; the
existing tools are poor / under-maintained or standard tools do not
exist (so users / developers roll their own.) You may have success in
the tools arena if you talk to mgorny or portage-utils@; I know mgorny
has written a few C tools and might have sufficient 'gentoo' C
libraries you could utilize; the portage-utils alias holds the
portage-utils authors (portage-utils being another set of tools
written in C for gentoo.)

I actually liked cbergstrom's idea of toolchain-type stuff; but I'm
not really sure how easy it is to on-board with those communities
(lord knows in my senior year of CS I would have been useless working
on a compiler.)

>
> --
> Thanks and Regards ,
> Gaurav