Debian participates in Google's Summer of Code

April 25th, 2007

The Debian project is proud that it has been accepted by Google as a mentor organisation for this year's Summer of Code program, with nine tasks in total. Google will fund the students mentioned below to work full time on these tasks during their summer vacation, from May 28th to August 20th. They will be guided and evaluated during this time by active Debian developers.

The main focus of all the student tasks is to create or improve utilities that assist developers working on Debian packages and the Debian release. Several tasks cover communication between software authors, users and Debian developers. A number of tasks target quality assurance and improved testing, while others will result in new tools that help maintain Debian systems.

In particular the following tasks and students have been accepted:

Jeroen van Wolffelaar will implement Mole, an infrastructure for managing information. This will help make Debian's vast supply of data easier accessible to developers and users. Included are package history and release statistics.

Ian Haken will write tools to use QEMU, a virtual machine emulator, to test upgrades from one Debian release to the next without having to re-install a real machine. This will help automatically track down possible bugs in upgrade cycles.

Ana Beatriz Guerrero López will improve piuparts, a tool that helps testing and improving the quality of package installation, upgrade and removal scripts.

Gustavo Rezende Montesino will work on a bug triage and forward tool that will help developers deal more effectively with tracking bugs and interacting with bug reporters and upstream bug tracking systems.

Cameron Dale will expand a BitTorrent application to work effectively with large, constantly updating collections of files such as the Debian archive, and create a backend or proxy to the Debian package distribution tool APT to access it.

Pavel Vinogradov will develop a status monitoring system for security management of clusters of Debian systems. It is based on the OVAL language, which provides a uniform mechanism to report on and control security centrally.

Margarita Manterola Rivero will work on a web-based user interface to the Debian bug tracking system which will make it easier for users to report, check and manipulate bugs.

Martín Hernán Ferrari will implement a modular CD and DVD image testing tool that will allow automated testing of Debian CD and DVD images as they are produced.

Chris Lamb will implement a graphical user interface for building live Debian systems. This will make it much easier to generate Debian systems that boot and work directly from a CD/DVD.

Debian's tasks are listed in the Wiki.

The Summer of Code is documented on Google's website.

About Debian

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