From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1NsHBh-0003w5-8u for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:59:05 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 6E8F3E095B; Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:58:56 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtp.webfaction.com (mail6.webfaction.com [74.55.86.74]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 49901E095B for ; Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:58:54 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-ww0-f53.google.com (mail-ww0-f53.google.com [74.125.82.53]) by smtp.webfaction.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 54EBE3912E1 for ; Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:58:54 -0500 (CDT) Received: by wwi17 with SMTP id 17so1138961wwi.40 for ; Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:58:52 -0700 (PDT) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-soc@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-soc@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.216.174.129 with SMTP id x1mr1470903wel.140.1268924332833; Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:58:52 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:58:52 +0100 Message-ID: <8f234f341003180758i4f095a0atf1dccaebf7ac66e0@mail.gmail.com> Subject: [gentoo-soc] Two ideas: R package installer (CRAN) and per-user daemons From: Auke Booij To: gentoo-soc@lists.gentoo.org Cc: bicatali@gentoo.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Archives-Salt: e43b2be3-3e9a-42af-b499-468f8da8947a X-Archives-Hash: d4de46270b3cce1c02dc167260b9078b Hey there, Google Summer of Code is slowly taking off, I'd like to claim a spot. Two ideas I'd like to expand on behalf of Gentoo are: 1. R package installer (also see gentoo-wiki.com). R has a lot of additional packages, so it is not feasible to manually create and maintain ebuilds for all of them. There are a number of databases containing these additional packages, including CRAN and Bioconductor. Three reasonable solutions are: 1. create a big ebuild with loads and loads of USE flags which compiles and installs the wanted R packages as one big package (not the best, since this is exactly what we want to avoid with Gentoo, and we would indeed need loads of use flags), 2. generate ebuilds for all packages (this would need regular running of scripts, and would probably need for its own overlay), 3. install to the filesystem without letting the package manager know about anything (ehm... I guess this is not a reasonable solution, after all). Are there any ideas about how to solve this, and how R usually installs them? Sebastien fabbro, I cc'd you, are you still interested in mentoring this? 2. Per-user daemons. Currently, there are some daemons, like PulseAudio, jackd, several download daemons, and soon possibly X.org (which will no longer need to run as root, and really should run as a normal user), which run as specific users, instead of root or a systemwide daemon-specific user. There is currently no framework for launching these daemons at all, and the current solution is to either make users figure out their own solution (a popular one is an extra line in .xinitrc), or to set the username in some conf.d file, thus disabling the possibility to run several of them for different users. I would like to develop an extension to our current init.d system which will enable users to write and start their own init scripts, which at first only run as themselves, not as another user. This would make it possible to cleanly launch several identical daemons for several users. This project would involve either writing a new additional init.d system, or extend our current system. I would like to know 1. if you guys are understanding a word of what I'm saying at all 2. if this would be an interesting idea (I think it is, of course) 3. anyone has any ideas or would like to mentor me. Thanks for your ideas. Auke Booij "tulcod".