Re: GSoC ideas

[Ludovic Courtès]

Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> skribis:

> Pjotr Prins writes:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 02:17:08PM -0800, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
>>> >>  - g-expressions which generate packages of the Guix package manager for
>>> >>    .deb and .rpm based distros, and work to get those upstream in Debian
>>> >>    and Fedora
>>> >
>>> > That would be useful, and CheckInstall may be good enough for that.  I
>>> > don’t think it’s “enough” for GSoC, though.  WDYT?
>>> 
>>> If the student was really to package Guix for many distributions, it
>>> might be enough.  Especially if that student was to explore packaging
>>> with upstream.  Anyway, the payout could be *huge*.
>>
>> One thing to keep in mind is that GSoC is about programming. So, we
>> have to be clear about that in the proposal.
>>
>>> If they finish early, I'm sure we could find other things for them to
>>> do?  :)
>>
>> Better to put a secondary job in - such as improving the web-ui or
>> creating a tool for importing deb packages, or something. Students
>> will come if they think the job challenging/interesting enough.
>>
>> Pj.
>
> So, while we're on the topic of hopes and dreams that I might
> *personally* love to see solved through GSoC, but maybe people will be
> like "That's not enough of a GSoC programming project"....

We could frame it in terms of programming: providing a Guix API for the
creation of Debian etc. packages.

There is (used to be?) something in Nixpkgs that produces a derivation
to build stuff in a Debian VM, build the .deb with CheckInstall, and
return that .deb as the derivation’s output.  Something like this is
definitely programming, and possibly fun as well.  :-)

Could you maybe add more details for this one on the wiki page?

> npm packaging and importer.  Even better: enough npm packaging and
> importing to where we package pump.io :)

Woow, why not!  Point the candidate to your blog post on that topic.
;-)

Ludo’.