Google SoC 2008

[Randall Wood]

On 2/29/08, James Berry <jberry at macports.org> 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/
>  .
>
>  You might be inclined to address any of the following questions:
>
>   - Do you feel MacPorts should participate in GSoC 2008?
>   - Are there particular MacPorts projects you'd like to suggest?

Yet another possible project (sorry for yapping about like this):

Add support for a mechanism similar to Finks init.[c]sh mechanisms for
providing basic and port-provided environmental services to users in
the .profile, .cshrc, and .xinitrc files, so that instead of
manipulating the user's .profile to modify certain paths, all we do is
append something like "source /opt/local/etc/bash.rc" to the end of a
user's .profile file and that bash.rc would be like /etc/rc and would
source all the files in /opt/local/etc/bash.d

This would require:
1)   Adding support to the Portfiles for setting key value pairs that
can then be written out at some phase (install?) into both correct
bash and csh (and maybe other shell) syntaxes and stored in
${prefix}/etc/init.d/${portname}.shell
2)   Adding support for managing X11-specific key value pairs that
would be stored into ${prefix}/etc/xinit.d/${portname}
3)   Writing the files ${prefix}/etc/init.shell for each shell we
decide to support. These files need only support correcting the PATH
and MANPATH for macports and then sourcing all of the files in init.d
ending in the correct shell.
4)   Writing ${prefix}/etc/init.X11 that would source
${prefix}/etc/init.sh (the xinit mechanism is a bash shell, I believe)
and then source all the files in init.d ending in X11.
5)   Provide a simple command line utility that can correctly
enable/disable sourcing the init.shell|X11 files for a user.

What gets inserted into a user's .profile/.xinitrc/.cshrc file? It
should be a couple of lines of comment explaining the single command
line that we added to the file followed by the command line (in bash:
source /opt/local/etc/init.sh)

>   - Are you willing to be a GSoC mentor?
>   - Would you be interested, as a student, in participating in a GSoC
>  project for MacPorts?
>
>  GSoC pays students a wage for the summer to work on open source
>  projects, and also a stipend to the project for each student project.
>
>  If interested, we need to move very quickly. As the Google GSoC FAQ
>  says:
>
>         "We'll begin accepting applications from open source mentoring
>  organizations on Monday, March 3, 2008; we'll stop accepting
>  organization applications on Wednesday, March 12th."
>
>  Your feedback is welcome
>
>  James
>  _______________________________________________
>  macports-dev mailing list
>  macports-dev at lists.macosforge.org
>  http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
>


-- 
Randall Wood
randall.h.wood at alexandriasoftware.com

"The rules are simple: The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes.
All the rest is just philosophy."