Thursday, April 24, 2008

Google Summer of Code, Gentoo

Right after the GSoC results were announced, Anant Narayanan sent an email to the gentoo-soc ML welcoming the students with lots of good advice about how to proceed, what all they can expect, and what all they're expected to do. Thanks Anant!

The only thing about that email that irked me was that third party source code management systems such as code.google.com, sf.net, and repo.or.cz were recommended for hosting the source code. Now, for a small project that does not have much in the name of Infra, this would be acceptable, but for a full-fledged organisation with a dedicated infra team, this looks quite shoddy (this probably happened due to insufficient communication between gentoo-soc and gentoo-infra). And on top of that, projects getting distributed across several repositories makes it impossible to find the code during and after SoC is finished. For instance, I am completely unable to find the code for a lot of the SoC 2007 projects.

Now, I understand that Gentoo Infra is very short-staffed and overworked at the moment, and hosting dedicated Trac setups for all the students is not an easy task. So I poked my mentor Patrick Lauer and asked him if he could host Redmine at gentooexperimental which could then be used as a central place for tracking/hosting all the Gentoo SoC projects. He agreed, but his dislike of Rails meant that I would have to do the setup and manage it.

And so it was done, and an email sent to the list. soc.gentooexperimental.org now hosts Redmine for project management.

After a small chat with Donnie Berkholz on IRC, we agreed that hosting the source code under Gentoo Infra and using Redmine for the rest of the stuff would be best. OTOH, Alec Warner was in favour of giving the students full freedom with hosting their projects as long as the place of their choice was usable. I replied to his email suggesting that in the interest of keeping the projects accessible from one place, people who want to do their development somewhere else be asked to create a dummy project at soc.ge.o which points to the place where the actual development is taking place.

Let's see how things turn out.

8 comments:

Saby said...

nice job

Nirbheek said...

Thanks =)

Ciaran McCreesh said...

What you're missing is that Gentoo has just lost hosting for half its hardware thanks to a certain infra member throwing a hissy fit. Thanks to their repeatedly having turned down all kinds of offers of hosting in favour of keeping all their eggs in as few baskets as possible, they're struggling to keep existing services running, let alone provide new ones.

Nirbheek said...

Strange, I heard a few days back that bugzilla was being moved to a new more powerful server

Apr 21 13:13:48 <Innocenti> We're busy getti9ng these boxes for bugzie
ready
Apr 21 13:14:48 <welp> whut
Apr 21 13:14:51 <welp> more bugzie boxen?
Apr 21 13:15:51 * ahbritto has quit (Client Quit)
Apr 21 13:20:35 * eth01 (i=eth01@gentoo/user/eth01) has joined
#gentoo-dev
Apr 21 13:24:05 <Innocenti> welp New bugzie boxes
Apr 21 13:24:23 <Innocenti> welp And more importantly better bugzie boxes
:-)
Apr 21 13:24:36 <welp> but but
Apr 21 13:24:44 <welp> what's gonna happen to the blades?
Apr 21 13:27:11 <Innocenti> Which blades ?
Apr 21 13:28:11 <welp> isn't bugzie currently hosted on some blades?
Apr 21 13:28:17 <robbat2> the GNi blades
Apr 21 13:28:25 <robbat2> long story
Apr 21 13:28:59 <robbat2> if you haven't been following all the details
elsewhere
Apr 21 13:29:26 <robbat2> welp, just rejoice for new bugzie machines

Ciaran McCreesh said...

The short version of the "long story" to which Robin is referring there is that GNi gave Gentoo thirty days to get all of their kit hosted elsewhere.

Nirbheek said...

Hmmm. Do you have links to the long story? I'm curious about the context of that ultimatum.

Ciaran McCreesh said...

So far as I'm aware, nothing's been made public about it. But you can get more or less what happened from this comment by 'Ned' a while ago:

<@solar> Cardoe: hrmm. are you attempting to pick a fight w/ me? If so
thats not the best idea in the world.. I hope you realize if I retired
on bad terms, gentoo would be without about half it's critical
servers/services. If you would prefer however we can just start
ignoring ya again.

Nirbheek said...

Thanks for the info, but that doesn't really give me much context to form a complete opinion about this :)