Google Summer of Code/2021/Ideas
Want to spend your summer contributing full-time to Gentoo, and get paid for it? Gentoo is in its 10th year in the Google Summer of Code. In the past, most of our successful students have become Gentoo developers, so your chances of becoming one are very good if you're accepted into this program.
Most ideas listed here have a contact person associated with them. Please get in touch with them earlier rather than later to develop your idea into a complete application. You can find many of them on Freenode's IRC network under the same username. If there is no contact information, please join the gentoo-soc mailing list or #gentoo-soc on the Freenode IRC network, and we will work with you to find a mentor and discuss your idea.
You don't have to apply for one of these ideas! You can come up with your own, and as long as it fits into Gentoo, we'll be happy to work with you to develop it. Remember, your project needs to have deliverables in less than 3 months of work in most cases. Be ambitious but not too ambitious ;)
Students, please read this first
We have a custom application template that we will ask you to fill out. Here it is:
Congratulations on applying for a project with Gentoo! To improve your chances of succeeding with this project, we want to make sure you're sufficiently prepared to invest a full summer's worth of time on it. In addition to the usual application, there are 2 specific actions and 2 pieces of info we would like to see from you:
- Use the tools that you will use in your project to make changes to code (e.g., source code management [SCM] software such as CVS, Subversion, or git). Please use the same SCM as you will use for your project to check out one of our repositories, make a change to it, and post that change as a patch on a mailing list or bug. Please fix a real bug reported in Bugzilla to show that you can use the tools to make a meaningful change. Your contact in Gentoo can help you determine which SCM and repository you should use for this as well as a good bug to fix. If your idea doesn't have a contact, please get in touch with us on the gentoo-soc mailing list or in real-time on IRC. Once you've made your change, link to it from your application.
- Participate in our development community. Please make a post to one of our mailing lists and link to it from your application (archives.gentoo.org holds past postings). The gentoo-soc list would be a good starting point, if you aren't subscribed to any others already. The best posts would be an introduction of the project you're applying for and a little background about you, to introduce yourself to the community and get some broader input about your project.
- Give us your contact info and working hours. Please provide your email address, home mailing address, and phone number. This is a requirement and provides for accountability on both your side and ours. Also, please tell us what hours you will be working and responsive to contact via email and IRC; these should sum to at least 35 hours a week.
These actions are things you will do extremely commonly as an open-source developer, and they really aren't that hard, so don't let them hold you back! The remainder of the application is free-form. Please read our application guidelines and Google's FAQ to complete it. Good luck!
Ideas
Big Data Infrastructure by Gentoo
The big data infrastructures are mostly built on the Java virtual machine ecosystem, most notably in Java and Scala.
Nevertheless, Java has not been adopted smoothly into GNU/Linux distributions. The packaging of Java software are considered difficult by the GNU/Linux community (e.g. Debian, Archlinux, Fedora). At the same time, the Java community has its own set of repositories like maven, functionally similar to packages in GNU/Linux distributions.
The Gentoo Java Project has done a good job laying out the framework of the Java ecosystem in Gentoo. At the same time, there are still thousands of useful Java packages to be packaged and maintained. The project will parse the metadata of maven packages and automatically write ebuilds compatible with the Java build system used in Gentoo. We are going to set up and maintain an automatically updated maven overlay every Gentoo user can use. The overlay will at least contain spark and hadoop. We aim to make Gentoo an attractive choice for data scientists, Java developers, users and big data system administrators.
A preliminary tool, java-ebuilder is available as app-portage/java-ebuilder. A proof-of-concept overlay is also made.
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Gentoo Developer Services
Gentoo is running a number of core services for both developers and users. These are for instance the packages database (packages.gentoo.org), the mail archive (archives.gentoo.org), the bug tracker (bugs.gentoo.org) and others.
Are you interested intoː
- digging into one of these services and improving it, or
- working on a rewrite of one of these services to get it into production, or
- applying our Tyrian theme to one of the services that don't have it yet?
If so, there is a lot of possible things to work on. We can agree which service fits best based on your skills and preferences. The goal is, to get the results of your work into production so that the impact of your work will be visible for everyone using any of these services.
Most of our services are written in Go. So you should be either familiar with the language or ready to dig into it while working with the services. More importantly though is the enthusiasm to dig into an existing project and improve it. Don't hesitate to reach out in case of questions.
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Gentoo Containers
Gentoo is currently already building its own docker images. However, there are still two things that need to be doneː
- get our docker images labeled as official base image on dockerhub
- migrate more of our core services we are hosting to our new gentoo docker images
If you are enthusiastic about both Gentoo and containers we are definitely looking forward to tackling these two tasks. The results of your work will be directly visible on dockerhub.
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Portage powered Android
The Android custom ROM development has been based on cross-compilation and flashing whole partitions. This paradigm has been serving well for the embedded system developments. But as the performance of personal mobile devices boost, it becomes feasible and desirable to introduce package management like personal computers. In addition, with the introduction of Project Treble in Android 8.0 Oreo, device drivers are managed separately, opening more possibilities of operating system customization. Package manangement will make software installation and update reliable, reproducible, incremental and convienent.
This project aims to introduce Gentoo's prestiges package manager, portage, to manage Android software stack. Taking KirenaHoro's work as the starting point, you are going to develop a framework to drive the AOSP/LineageOS build system into a set of portage ebuilds.
In addition, this project targets an update of Project:Android to work from within an Android app without rooting the device, to offer Gentoo to diverted audience and ease the adoption of GNU userlands on Android devices. For this part, a normal (unrooted, bootlocked phone) is sufficient. Bumping and upstreaming gentooandroid.sf.net's patches to bootstrap-prefix.sh and in $PORTDIR is a possible pathway. A suggested list of progressive steps would be to make bootstrap-prefix.sh work on a gentoo box, after removing : /usr/bin/python at step 1, /tmp at step 2, /etc/passwd at step 3. Step 4 would be to target Termux on vanilla Android that lacks /bin/sh, step 5 to take out /usr/bin/perl for LaTeX, step 6 /dev/tty for Xvfb.
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Standalone Gentoo Chromebook
Gentoo portage is driving the build system of Google Chromebooks thanks to its flexibility and power. However, portage and other Gentoo tools are invisible to end-users because portage is only used to cross compile and build the filesystem image. The resulting image does not have portage or toolchain, and becomes a feature-limited ChromeOS compared to a standard Gentoo system. ChromiumOS, the community counterpart of ChromeOS, is an open operating system that is straightforward to build and hack. In this project, we will make a full-featured Gentoo-like ChromiumOS combining the innovative Chromebook experience with flexibility of portage and software packages from Gentoo.
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Redox Relibc Support
Redox is a brand new operating system written in rust, it provides a libc implementation that works both on Linux and on the Redox kernel.
This project aims to be able to have a x86_64-unknown-linux-relibc stage3 produced and pave the way to have portage available to the Redox operating system itself, last year most of the relibc bugs had been addressed and relibc had been able to build a working GNU toolchain.
Main Tasks:
- Make a relibc ebuild that can be part of the main portage.
- Make sure base system could be built on top of it
- Confirm that Gentoo toolchain utilities still build, e.g. building Python3 and Bash
- Confirm that alternative toolchain could build (LLVM, clang)
- Report any issues to both Gentoo and Redox
- Submit Merge Requests fixes/improvements upstream to Redox GitLab
- Build a stage3 with the current relibc and the toolchain.
- Have a gentoo-prefix running on Redox
In order to apply on top of the normal Gentoo requirement of fixing an open issue and/or send a pull request, it is required to propose a fix or an improvement on the redox gitlab.
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