As some of you know, I’ve applied to this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). In particular, I am interested in working with the Debian project, but my proposal has impact in a few other communities, including KDE’s Qt project and Perl.
Every year, Google provides students with a $4500USD stipend to work on an open source proposal that they submit. Additionally, they provide $500 to the organizations that mentor students.
Last year, there were 1125 students/proposals accepted for the Google Summer of Code, which means that Google was prepared to invest over $5M in the development of open source software, the development of which does not directly benefit them. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty good case of “Don’t be evil” to me.
My proposal is mainly on two fronts:
- The Debian control files are the backbone of Debian’s package system. Each package has a file that describes things like dependencies, so that tools like APT and Aptitude can use them to provide access to a rich package-based repository of software. Part of my proposal involves providing a programmatic interface for handling these files, which I’m told sounds like a boring task. That might be true, but the huge positive ramifications it has for my favourite operating system are compelling enough for me to want to work on it.
- Perhaps more interestingly is the K Desktop Environment, which is a project to provide a pretty easy-to-use graphical interface for Linux. Along with this is a toolkit for creating applets called Qt (and indeed, the resulting interfaces are cuties). One of the problems for Debian though is no complete implementation of a Perl interface to this toolkit, which is something I hope to change.
While the second task looks a bit scary at first (since I don’t know anything about KDE4 or Qt4 yet), I’m confident my experience playing with foreign function interfaces in Perl using XS will reduce the learning curve substantially.
I’m quite anxious to find out the results. My project is one of twelve that have been shortlisted by the Debian GSoC people as projects that they would like to see funded. If you’re bored or otherwise interested, you can read the full text online. The results will be published and announced on April 20th at some point, so I’ll be getting increasingly nervous as we get closer to that date.
” One of the problems for Debian though is no complete implementation of a Perl interface to this toolkit, which is something I hope to change.”
Do you mean that you want to create Perl bindings for Qt? If so, post on kde-bindings@kde.org ASAP, as they have some neat tools to make this easier (I’ve seen too many people making life harder for themselves and others by NIH’ing their own bindings solutions).
Well, right now there is someone working on it – http://code.google.com/p/perlqt4/ – and it’s based on KDE’s Smoke and the Perl-Qt3 bindings.
However, right now development is stalled because the author is having some threading issues. So I intend to take a look at that and try to figure it out with him.
Thanks for the comment :-)
This might be something worth looking into. One thing I want to do is transfer the registration for the “Qt” namespace over to KDE (right now it’s “first come” for Ashley Winters, and that module hasn’t been updated since 1997)
[…] } Last year, I had a great time participating in the Google Summer of Code with the Debian project. I had a neat project with some rather interesting implications for helping […]
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