Re: Hurd GSoC 2013 projects

[Fotis Koutoulakis]

>> First, congratulations again for getting your applications accepted!  In
>> no particular order: 陆岳 (Yue Lu) »Improve the GDB Port for GNU Hurd«,
>> <http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/hacklu/1>;
>> Fotis Koutoulakis »Porting the GCC go language frontend on the GNU/HURD
>> kernel«,
>> <http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/nlightnfotis/1>;
>> Justus Winter »Debian GNU/Hurd Debianish initialization«,
>> <http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2013/StudentApplications/JustusWinter>.

Ι would like to thank you again, and also congratulate everyone else
that was accepted!

>> Copyright assignment.

Having read that, I would like to ask one question. Is it possible
that I can assign
copyrights to the FSF for any possible contribution to any given
moment? I wanna contribute
heavily to gnu projects from now on, so having to send copyright
assignments for each and
every single one of them seems to be... counterintuitive if I may say.
So if I can just send a
general copyright assignment for anything I may do to any GNU project
in the future I would
prefer to do so.

Anyway, I will sent the copyright assignment, most likely, tomorrow.
The only reason I have not
sent it yet, is because I would like to make sure that my school
doesn't have any copyright on my
code, as I am student laboratory associate. Will make sure about that
tomorrow, and then proceed
on sending it.

>> Time commitment.

I have no foreseeable issues with time, and don't have any time off
planned, however I would like
to know if any of you guys are planning to go to Debconf in
Switzerland in August. If you do, then
I would love to participate in Debconf and get to know you guys if possible.

>> Next steps.
>> Fotis, please follow up on the emails Ian and I sent on this
>> topic for GCC -- for example, is you machine fast and reliable enough to
>> build GCC natively on GNU/Hurd?

I think I had sent an email regarding that. Then again, maybe not. In
any case, my computer seems to be fast enough. I will provide
benchmarks when I find the time in that specific thread, but for now,
I can report some specs for computer:
It is a Debian Linux box, with a Intel Core i5 3570, 12gigs or ram,
and 500GB hdd. I leave the specs for you to comment on. I know it's
not state of the art, but I had it upgraded earlier in the year with
virtualization in mind, so I think it will pay off now.

Btw I remember building gcc for Linux from scratch inside a Fedora VM
in Virtualbox, and it was fast enough. Don't remember the numbers
right now, I will benchmark it both in Debian (the host) and under the
HURD (QEMU as the hypervizor) and report back on it.

>> Weekly reports.

I will setup a user page. For now, I am currently studying both the
Hurd and GCC (using as much time as I can, because I also study for my
exams. But I can commit (until june 21) 2-5 hours a day studying for
my project. If you think I will need more then maybe I can find some
time by sleeping later in the night, at about 4 o 'clock in the
morning (04:00 gmt + 2). You can expect me to be present on IRC during
the time I use to work on my project.


>> Next steps.  It's now the community bonding period

I have one last question about this. Will we get access to the HURD
repository on savannah? Is there anything we need to gain access? For
instance a @gnu.org email address? Something else? If so, how can we
obtain the credentials needed to gain access?

>> Hi Fotis, this is very nice. I grew quite fond of Go and will use it
>> for my project as well.

Thank you Justus! I am glad you share my enthusiasm about Google's Go.
I will see to it that it will be available on the Hurd. Enabling
translators written
on the Hurd is one of my goals in my project.

I would like to grab this opportunity to say that your projects also seem very
interesting, and the best thing about them is that they seem to be a great way
to enhance the Hurd in any possible way.


On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 12:00 PM, Thomas Schwinge
<thomas@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> "Finally", some administrativa for the Hurd GSoC 2013 projects.  Everyone
> loves administrativa, I know.  ;-)
>
>
> First, congratulations again for getting your applications accepted!  In
> no particular order: 陆岳 (Yue Lu) »Improve the GDB Port for GNU Hurd«,
> <http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/hacklu/1>;
> Fotis Koutoulakis »Porting the GCC go language frontend on the GNU/HURD
> kernel«,
> <http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/nlightnfotis/1>;
> Justus Winter »Debian GNU/Hurd Debianish initialization«,
> <http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2013/StudentApplications/JustusWinter>.
>
>
> Copyright assignment.  As goverened by the Free Software Foundation, the
> GNU Hurd (as well as GCC and GDB, for these two GSoC projects) requires
> copyright assignment for any non-trivial patches that you contribute.
> <http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers.html> has
> further information, if you're interested.  For simplicity, I suggest to
> assign any past and future changes, using the form that I attached to
> this email.  The GDB and GCC projects will definitely need to be covered
> for the two respective GSoC projects, and I suggest that each of you
> three at the same time also requests assignment for changes in GNU Hurd,
> GNU Mach, and the GNU C Library: then all the core Hurd stuff is covered,
> and you don't have to worry about it later.  (For example, there is a
> high possibility that Fotis, in addition to changes in GCC's Go source
> files, will also be doing changes in libpthread (part of GNU Hurd) and/or
> glibc.)  You can leave the field empty that asks you about files you have
> already changed.  If you send in the forms to the email address indicated
> on top of the attached file, please put me in CC so that I can track the
> status.  For GCC Go, I think there is also a separate assignment (or
> similar) needed for the Google Go code, Ian?
>
>
> Open discussion.  Any discussion related to your GSoC work should be held
> in public on the respective projects' mailing lists.  It is fine to send
> your emails both to the debian-hurd/GCC/GDB list and also bug-hurd at the
> same time, so that both the GCC/GDB folks and the Hurd folks can see it
> and answer as appropriate.  It may also be a good idea to put your
> mentors in CC, so they can easily see what's going on.
>
> There are no stupid questions.  I do know my share of things of the GDB
> and GCC code bases, for example, but I'm sure as you make progress, I'll
> also spend a bunch of time reading the existing GCC and GDB code and
> related Hurd code, and ask questions about it (which you perhaps then can
> already answer).  For every "stupid" question you ask on IRC or the
> project's mailing list, always remember there are at least three other
> people who wonder about the same questions, but just didn't ask it yet.
>
> Generally, no HTML email should be sent (several lists are configured to
> reject HTML email, as Fotis already learned for the GCC list).  Please
> make some effort to keep email threads readable (proper quoting of
> previous messages, no top-posting, discussing one issue in one email
> thread, etc. -- please ask if there are any questions about this, but
> From the emails we exchanged so far with each of you three, that already
> looks fine).
>
> There are a few IRC channels that you can use for discussion: on
> freenode: #hurd, #gdb; on OFTC: #debian-hurd, #gcc.  This is often
> helpful for quick question/answer topics or interactive discussions
> (assuming that someone is currently available to discuss with).  Please
> be patient if there isn't someone answering immediatelly; some of us read
> the backlog of messages in batches, and answer then.
>
> In the past, we've made good experiences with weekly IRC meetings.  The
> idea for these meetings is to discuss your next steps for the following
> week(s).  We'll discuss the meeting time later on -- of course 19:00 UTC
> (as used in the past) in not very suitable for China (03:00).  Yue Lu,
> I'm sorry you stayed awake last Thursday and joined IRC -- and there was
> no meeting, so I apologize that I didn't clearly tell you there was no
> meeting scheduled.  Let's first start the regular IRC meetings once we've
> found and set a suitable time.  But please: do not wait for the meeting
> if you have anything to discuss, but instead contact us early.  When
> you're stuck, it's often just a tiny hint that you need before you can
> make progress again on your own.
>
> The formally assigned mentors are for the Debian GNU/Hurd project Samuel
> Thibault with Pino Toscano, for the GDB project I with help from Luis
> Machado on the GDB/gdbserver side, and for the GCC project I with Ian
> Taylor for the GCC Go side -- but the idea is that you learn to interact
> with the existing community of these projects for discussing your
> questions and getting your patches reviewed, and the mentors are mostly
> for the formal/administrative stuff (which of course is not all discussed
> in public, as appropriate).  The mentors will be doing the mid-term and
> final evaluations in cooperation with the co-mentors.
>
> Any communication (aside from scheduled IRC meetings) should be expected
> to be asynchronous, with delays from seconds/minutes (IRC discussion) to
> hours/days (email) to weeks (FSF copyright assignment) to mon...  We'll
> try to answer any questions you have in a timely manner, but please keep
> in mind that everyone of us mentors (as far as I know) is doing the GSoC
> mentoring in his free time, so there may be delays if our time is needed
> for higher-priority (work) tasks.
>
> If there is a need for it, we can also arrange voice communication,
> phone, Google+ Hangout, or similar.
>
> Unfortunately, we're not quite near to each other on the globe, so any
> personal meetings will be unlikely, but just in case: I'm located in
> southern Germany, so please contact me should you ever be in the area.
>
>
> Weekly reports.  Additional to the IRC meetings and any other emails you
> send, we'd like some sort of weekly report, covering what you have done
> in the last week, what worked fine, what didn't, and so on.  How/where
> you do the reporting, we don't really care, as long as it's publically
> accessible.  You can send a weekly status email, or post an article on
> your personal blog, of host a page/blog on the GNU Hurd wiki (which
> several GSoC students have done in the past; see some of the subpages on
> <http://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/user/>).
>
> It is best of course, if there is some correlation between the timeline
> you proposed in your GSoC project applications and the progress you're
> actually making, but it is to be expected that you have to adjust the
> former.  (And don't worry if ther are weeks where you don't seem to get a
> lot done -- things take time.)  Please do make some effort to predict how
> log certain tasks will take (and then how long they actually took...):
> this is a good exercise for the difficult topic of software development
> time scheduling (speaking from my own experience...) ;-) and that surely
> will be helpful later in your jobs, too.
>
>
> Time commitment.  The GSoC is meant to be a full-time job, so five
> regular work-days per week, something like at least 30 to 40 hours on
> average.  How you schedule these we don't really care, but please
> remember: if you start late in the morning, it'll get late in the
> evening.  Also, if you have other commitments (like university work to do
> in the next few weeks, as I know from two of you), it should be fine to
> temporarily work less on your GSoC project if discussed in advance with
> your mentor, and likewise if you want to take a break of a few days for
> vacation, for visiting someone, or Justus going to the European Juggling
> Convention.  It is, however, expected that the GSoC project is your focus
> during the GSoC period, so it's not OK to work on another (full-time) job
> in parallel, and similar.
>
>
> GNU/Hurd system.  Please remember that the GNU/Hurd system is nowhere as
> polished as a recent GNU/Linux system.  A lot of things work fine a lot
> of times, but always expect for "strange" things to happen occasionally
> -- these may of course be problems in the buggy code you've written ;-)
> or perhaps just a strange thing the GNU/Hurd system "doesn't like".  The
> community and the mentors will guide you through any issues, but you have
> to talk to them so they know about what you're seeing.
>
>
> Next steps.  It's now the community bonding period, in which you're to
> continue interacting with the projects' community, and slowly begin
> working towards your GSoC projects (subject to first finishing your
> university work, of course).  For example, now it's high time to make
> sure that you have the development environment/infrastructure for working
> on your GSoC project: a suitably powered machine, etc.  Justus, anything
> you need?  Fotis, please follow up on the emails Ian and I sent on this
> topic for GCC -- for example, is you machine fast and reliable enough to
> build GCC natively on GNU/Hurd?  Otherwise, we should look for a suitable
> remote machine for you to use.  Yue Lu already has shown GDB testsuite
> results that mostly match those I'm getting, so that should be fine.
>
>
> Surely there are some other things I have forgotten, which we'll discuss
> in the following.
>
>
> And now: enjoy your work on your respective projects!  :-)
>
>
> Grüße,
>  Thomas
>
>
>
> Please email the following information to assign@gnu.org, and we
> will send you the assignment form for your past and future changes.
>
> Please use your full legal name (in ASCII characters) as the subject
> line of the message.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> REQUEST: SEND FORM FOR PAST AND FUTURE CHANGES
>
> [What is the name of the program or package you're contributing to?]
>
>
> [Did you copy any files or text written by someone else in these changes?
> Even if that material is free software, we need to know about it.]
>
>
> [Do you have an employer who might have a basis to claim to own
> your changes?  Do you attend a school which might make such a claim?]
>
>
> [For the copyright registration, what country are you a citizen of?]
>
>
> [What year were you born?]
>
>
> [Please write your email address here.]
>
>
> [Please write your postal address here.]
>
>
>
>
>
> [Which files have you changed so far, and which new files have you written
> so far?]
>



-- 
Fotis 'NlightNFotis' Koutoulakis

- "Non semper aestas erit; venit hiems."