[gentoo-soc] Adding Portage Features or Wireless Support

[gentoo-soc] Adding Portage Features or Wireless Support

[Colleen Josephson]

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I am Colleen Josephson, a second year MIT student interested in programming
for Gentoo's Summer of Code.
I've been a Gentoo user for 4-5 years, and it is my primary operating
system. I have done some larger scale projects
(Audacious plugins, a Python sound synthesizer), and have familiarity with
source control, but I have never developed for the open source community
before.
I am most familiar with Python at this point, but I know some Java and C and
would enjoy working with those languages as well.

I am potentially interested in the Portage Tags project, or something
involving improving the wireless support for Gentoo installs.
Potential expansions to the Portage projects I am considering are improving
the search speed, and an auto-complete similar to Debian's.
As far as the wireless, I've noticed that the #1 most difficult part or my
last 3 Gentoo installs has been setting up wireless correctly, and
this difficulty is often a deterrent for trying out Gentoo among my peers. I
know this can be an area of contention because of the number
of closed source drivers, but I think it could be a worthwhile improvement.
Any feedback on this is appreciated.

These ideas are very incomplete, but I look forward to your responses so I
can improve upon them.

Finally, could somebody point me to a good bug to fix in bugzilla as per the
application guidelines?

Thanks,
Colleen Josephson
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Class of 2013

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Re: [gentoo-soc] Adding Portage Features or Wireless Support

[Brian Dolbec]

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On Sun, 2011-03-20 at 21:21 -0400, Colleen Josephson wrote:
> I am Colleen Josephson, a second year MIT student interested in
> programming for Gentoo's Summer of Code.
> I've been a Gentoo user for 4-5 years, and it is my primary operating
> system. I have done some larger scale projects
> (Audacious plugins, a Python sound synthesizer), and have familiarity
> with source control, but I have never developed for the open source
> community before.
> I am most familiar with Python at this point, but I know some Java and
> C and would enjoy working with those languages as well.
> 
> I am potentially interested in the Portage Tags project, 

Well, you could expand it some by also adding it to pkgcore, (adding it
to porthole would be easy for me), but you also need to add an api for
it in the portage public api. There is also some additional work to add
it to some gentoolkit modules.



> or something involving improving the wireless support for Gentoo
> installs.
> Potential expansions to the Portage projects I am considering are
> improving the search speed,

That may be a difficult one to achieve.  There have been many
improvements used from pkgcore to help speed up portage, but the
additional features are consuming the savings again.


>  and an auto-complete similar to Debian's.
> As far as the wireless, I've noticed that the #1 most difficult part
> or my last 3 Gentoo installs has been setting up wireless correctly,
> and 
> this difficulty is often a deterrent for trying out Gentoo among my
> peers. I know this can be an area of contention because of the number
> of closed source drivers, but I think it could be a worthwhile
> improvement. Any feedback on this is appreciated.
> 


There was a gsoc project last year that involved better wireless support
in gentoo.  Not necessarily for the install kernel.

> These ideas are very incomplete, but I look forward to your responses
> so I can improve upon them.
> 
> Finally, could somebody point me to a good bug to fix in bugzilla as
> per the application guidelines?
> 
> Thanks,
> Colleen Josephson
> Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology
> Class of 2013


-- 
Brian Dolbec <brian.dolbec@gmail.com>

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Re: [gentoo-soc] Adding Portage Features or Wireless Support

[Petteri Räty]

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On 03/21/2011 03:21 AM, Colleen Josephson wrote:

> 
> I am potentially interested in the Portage Tags project, or something
> involving improving the wireless support for Gentoo installs.
> Potential expansions to the Portage projects I am considering are
> improving the search speed, and an auto-complete similar to Debian's.
>

For search speed take a look at app-portage/eix. If auto-completer means
telling what to install to get certain binaries then it's quite hard to
implement because the set of installed files depend on USE flags and and
requires actually building all the packages to get the list.

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-soc] Adding Portage Features or Wireless Support

[Fabian Groffen]

On 21-03-2011 07:44:52 +0200, Petteri Räty wrote:
> On 03/21/2011 03:21 AM, Colleen Josephson wrote:
> 
> > 
> > I am potentially interested in the Portage Tags project, or something
> > involving improving the wireless support for Gentoo installs.
> > Potential expansions to the Portage projects I am considering are
> > improving the search speed, and an auto-complete similar to Debian's.
> >
> 
> For search speed take a look at app-portage/eix. If auto-completer means
> telling what to install to get certain binaries then it's quite hard to
> implement because the set of installed files depend on USE flags and and
> requires actually building all the packages to get the list.

In addition, recent Portages have a quite enjoyable suggestion of
packages that are similar to the package you entered, but could not be
found.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level

Re: [gentoo-soc] Adding Portage Features or Wireless Support

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 07:44 Mon 21 Mar     , Petteri Räty wrote:
> On 03/21/2011 03:21 AM, Colleen Josephson wrote:
> > I am potentially interested in the Portage Tags project, or 
> > something involving improving the wireless support for Gentoo 
> > installs. Potential expansions to the Portage projects I am 
> > considering are improving the search speed, and an auto-complete 
> > similar to Debian's.
> 
> For search speed take a look at app-portage/eix. If auto-completer 
> means telling what to install to get certain binaries then it's quite 
> hard to implement because the set of installed files depend on USE 
> flags and and requires actually building all the packages to get the 
> list.

It ought to be fairly easy to build this database on one of the 
tinderboxes for packages without considering USE flags, and assuming it 
might be incomplete because you don't build with every USE possibility.

In fact, I feel like this, or something extremely similar, was done by 
Sebastian Pipping in GSoC 2009 and has been in "beta" form since. I use 
quotation marks because I don't know if anyone's worked on it in the 
past year.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Admin, Summer of Code
Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.com

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