GSoC 2013: Binaries Idea

[Joshua Root]

On 2013-4-23 08:07 , Clemens Lang wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 05:28:08PM -0300, Marcelo Galvão Póvoa wrote:
>> Hi, I submitted a draft proposal to GSoC website, not including the
>> roadmap yet. I would be very grateful if you can give me any feedback
>> about it!
> 
> Looks good to me. The whole "Improvements to MPAB" is somewhat unclear
> to me. I suppose that's because I don't have any insight into MPAB and
> what improvements it needs. So far, I haven't seen (or don't remember)
> any problems with the buildbot setup we have, but maybe jmr knows more
> about that?

I can only think of the ones mentioned in the draft and previously
discussed here on the list, i.e. sandboxing and multiple variants. As I
mentioned before, more/better sandboxing would be done in base rather
than MPAB, and chrooting as mentioned in the proposal is probably not
the best avenue to pursue. (And TBH sandboxing base could be a full
project on its own.)

And again as mentioned previously, making MPAB build with a list of
variant sets rather than just default variants would be a quite simple
change, and it's just waiting on the input data to be used to choose the
variant sets.

Overall there doesn't appear to be much detail in the proposal beyond
the basic ideas that have previously been discussed on the list or
listed on the ideas page. There needs to be more about both what you
plan to do, and how you plan to do it. Compare the strengths and
weaknesses of different possible approaches. Show us that you really
understand the problem.

My feeling is that the tasks currently listed would only take the full
summer if you do a really comprehensive job. If you think you can do
that, great, just make sure your proposal reflects it. Alternatively,
you can come up with other related improvements. Maybe ask people on
-users what they would like to see. I'm sure there are plenty of good
ideas we haven't thought of.

- Josh