Google SoC 2008

[Anders F Björklund]

James Berry wrote:

> I'm writing to attempt to gauge interest in whether and how MacPorts
> should participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for 2008. See  
> http://code.google.com/soc/2008/
> .

There's also the old MacPorts Summer of Code pages from GSoc 2007:
http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/wiki/SummerOfCode

And there is the old organization page from last years 3 projects:
http://code.google.com/soc/2007/macports/about.html

> You might be inclined to address any of the following questions:
>
>   - Do you feel MacPorts should participate in GSoC 2008?

If there are any mentors available to participate, sure why not...

Though I am not sure what eventually came out of GSoc 2007, even
if I did see the new "merge.rb" and "port trace" and "registry2.0" ??

i.e.
- Automate and beautify creation of universal binaries
- Port isolation while building
- Dependencies
- New Repository Backend

Maybe one of last years mentors (or students) can share thoughts ?

>   - Are there particular MacPorts projects you'd like to suggest?

I think the following would be nice to have:

- Binaries / Packages ("Task 4" in Wiki)

Using archives (tgz/tbz/tlz) would probably be easiest to implement,
but packages (pkg/deb/rpm) would be the most useful in my opinion.
For a more ambitious project, re-uniting the backend so that it can
work with both ports (source) and packages (binary) would be cool...

- Graphical user interface ("Task 5" in Wiki)

Completing dp-cocoa/dpgui/PortsManager/Pallet/etc to provide an open
source user interface for managing ports would make it more available.
The ambitious is making an Objective-C framework and a real application,
but a nice looking front-end implemented by scripting is not too bad...

We've also here recently talked about these:

- Root privileges ("Task 7" in Wiki)
- Mirroring ("Task 9" in Wiki)

Following was done in MacPorts 1.6.0 already:

- Lint ("Task 10" in Wiki)
- Documentation and Website ("Task A2" in Wiki)


Cleaning up the old ports tree (including python and ruby) and taking
care of the large amount of tickets is also "nice to have" of course,
but not really something for such a student summer project (I think) ?
But, for all you bored students that don't get into a SoC program... ;-)

--anders