[gentoo-soc] GSoC 2013, Tags support for Portage Gentoo project

[gentoo-soc] GSoC 2013, Tags support for Portage Gentoo project

[Tabibel Sami]

Hello,
I am 1st year master degree of Cryptology and information security
I have good C, Python and Linux skills, I have also some experience
whith ncurses and onpenGL libraries, and i am interested to work on
"Tags support for Portage" Gentoo project this summer.

I am looking for any comment about the difficulty and the content of
the project, and also about my chances to be accepted if i apply for.
and how to increase them.

Thanks in advance.
Best Regards.

Re: [gentoo-soc] GSoC 2013, Tags support for Portage Gentoo project

[Zac Medico]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 6:33 PM, Tabibel Sami <sami.tabibel@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> I am 1st year master degree of Cryptology and information security
> I have good C, Python and Linux skills, I have also some experience
> whith ncurses and onpenGL libraries, and i am interested to work on
> "Tags support for Portage" Gentoo project this summer.
>
> I am looking for any comment about the difficulty and the content of
> the project, and also about my chances to be accepted if i apply for.
> and how to increase them.

Implementing tags is fairly easy to do, so it's not really enough work
for a SOC project. The main barrier on a simple project like tags is
getting your proposal accepted by the community. Typically, an
enhancement like this is proposed as a GLEP [1]. Simple proposals like
the tags proposal are extremely vulnerable to "bikeshedding" [2],
since practically anyone will feel qualified to give their input on
the proposal. This means that you will probably receive an
overwhelming amount of input from lots of different people with
conflicting ideas about how tags should be implemented.

Anyway, I think a metadata.xml extension would probably be the best
way to implement tags. For example, that's how we implemented USE flag
descriptions [3].

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality
[3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0056.html