Re: [IMPORTANT] Ideas for Summer of Code 2018

[Mathieu Lirzin]

Hello Giuseppe,

Giuseppe Scrivano <address@hidden> writes:

> Google is accepting applications for the next Summer of Code and as
> usual we are going to apply for it. José, Darshit and myself are going
> to manage the presence of GNU.

Thanks to the three of you for taking care of this.

> We should start thinking about a list of ideas for the next Summer of
> Code and potential mentors.
>
> Please start sending ideas to add to the page and link them to the
> potential mentors that can help with it.

Here is the first version of the ideas for GNU Automake:

GNU Automake

GNU Automake is a Makefile generator for the GNU Build system. The generated Makefiles are portable and compliant with to GNU Makefile standards.

Modularize Automake to improve the test-suite performance

Currently automake is implemented as a monolithic Perl script with some modules for code shared with aclocal which is another script distributed with Automake. To ensure its practical correctness Automake provides a huge test-suite and requires every non-trivial bug-fix to be covered by an additional non-regression test. Unfortunately this whole test-suite is quite slow to run (~20-30 min) which makes it hard for maintainers to effectively use it, and is long enough to refrain users to run it. The main reason for this slowness is that almost all tests are integration/validation tests that touch the file system. A more effective approach would be to replace those with unit tests when possible. The objective of this project is to incrementally refactor the current implementation by decomposing it into modules and unit test those with Test::More.

Skills: Good understanding of the different testing strategies, Basic knowledge of Perl
Mentor: Mathieu Lirzin
Contact: address@hidden

-- 
Mathieu Lirzin
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