An important announcement

We interrupt your regular lazy-webbing to make this two important announcements:

A) AutotuA 0.0.1 released! Try it out and report bugs (if you can't follow the instructions in the link given, your services will be required when 0.0.2 is released :)

B) IMO, the two best distros in this world are:

1. Foresight Linux
   • Ken Vandine (one of many) is effing awesome
2. Gentoo
   • The GNOME Team
   • Brent Baude (ranger): master-of-the-PPC-arch
   • Donnie Berkholz (dberkholz): X11, Council, and Desktop Team Emperor
   • Raúl Porcel (armin76): generic bitch; maintains half the arches and Firefox
   • Robin H. Johnson (robbat2): Infra demi-god
   • Zac Medico (zmedico): Portage demi-god

All these people are just too awesome (and too overworked) for words. If I hadn't got myself deep into Gentoo (which led to SoC too), I would've gone to Foresight :)

~Nirbheek,
Who has high hopes for AutotuA, and also hopes the best of Foresight and conary can be brought to Gentoo.

PS: Donnie, congrats once again! ;)

The much-delayed post

*Very* late, this post is. I hope it's not too late yet :)

I'm talking about something that was much-talked about, and people are probably following some of the suggestions made about this, but I think there should be some sort of standardisation.

Here's the header I use for all my GSoC code:


# vim: set sw=4 sts=4 et :
# Copyright: 2008 Gentoo Foundation
# Author(s): Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek.chauhan@gmail.com>
# License: GPL-2
#
# Immortal lh!
#


I encourage all of you to adopt the last two lines in your headers as well :D

AutotuA Weekly Status Report - I (and more ;)

Yes, I am alive and kicking. Although at a much slower pace than I would've liked ;)

So I sent my first weekly report over yesterday, you can either read the (excessively long and probably boring and or confusing) weekly report or you can, well, do something else :P

And guess what, next time onwards, all you have to do is checkout the AutotuA news page or subscribe to the "gsoc" label on this blog to stalk me.

Oh, right, this will also probably be my first post on the FLOSS India Planet!

Hello everyone!~ I'm Nirbheek Chauhan (also called as "slacker #1" by some). I was one of the co-ordinators of this tiny little event in IIT Kanpur's tech-festival Techkriti.

You might have heard about it and maybe seen the awesome speakers (and posters ;) of the event.

You've probably had the pleasure of conversing with the mastermind behind the whole event.

And maybe, just maybe, you've heard about "FOSSKriti" :D

PS: We'll (hopefully) be back next year, so this is shameless advance publicity ;p

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.

Wheeeeeeeeeee

So today was the day.
An insane night, on an insane channel.

So we were promised Cake.
Which got a bit delayed,
but the end we got a plate
Which was truly worth the wait

Translation: I've gotten accepted into GSoC, and the community bonding period has begun!

A couple of people I know got accepted as well -- Satya, Ramnik, and Siddarth. This will be a fun summer *grin*.

I was going through the abstracts of the accepted applications in orgs that interest me, and I found the following to be *very* interesting (in no specific order):

• Vim: On-the-fly Code Checker for Vim
  

  
  I don't need to say anything about this -- it's simply wonderful.
  

  
  


• Pidgin: Master password support for pidgin
  

  
  Finally, I won't have to type in three passwords when I start Pidgin. gnome-keyring integration ftw!
  

  
  


• GNOME: Reducing memory fragmentation in GNOME
  

  
  Reduced memory is always more than welcome, and it's not an easy task at all :)
  

  
  


• GNOME: SuperRandom: a predictive listening plugin for Rhythmbox
  

  
  This should be interesting. I currently have to manually form lists of songs I like to listen to. Time will tell how well this project fruits.
  

  
  


• GNOME: Make Evolution use Seahorse widgets for encryption and key selection
  

  
  No more UI blocking, and no more f-ugly password prompts! Fun, fun, fun =)
  

  
  


• GNOME: Integrated Media Management for GNOME
  

  
  This has always been a major missing feature in GNOME. This gets implemented, and I owe the student+mentor(s) a beer each *g*
  

  
  


• GStreamer: Media service to transcode video and audio in different formats
  

  
  If this integrates well with the above GNOME project, things will take a turn for the better w.r.t media in GNOME.
  

  
  


• Moinmoin: Extending moin's groups to LDAP and other external sources.
  

  
  We use MoinMoin for our internal wiki, and authentication is done against LDAP. So needless to say, this project will make management of roles using LDAP groups quite straightforward.
  

  
  


• BZFlag: BZFWeb, a web-based BZFS admin interface.
  

  
  Just today we were talking about implementing a basic web interface for BZFlag in Django over the summer, and this thing comes up :)
  Although our idea was to let people select server options using the webinterface, and then connect to the server, this project would be a good thing to keep an eye on.
  

  
  


• FFmpeg: Generic frame-level multithreading support
  

  
  This will rock for everyone with more than one core. This doesn't include me, but includes the Navya Server ;)
  

  
  

portage-talk, gsoc, gentoo, ntgwn, and more

A lot has been happening in the past two weeks, but I'll (try to) keep the post relatively short.

• portage-talk - A "library" of bash functions that can be used to talk to Portage (the tree + package db). It's basically for use in bash scripts to get data about installed packages, ebuilds, etc. It aims to be blazing fast and have minimal dependencies (nothing beyond bash + coreutils). This also means that the code isn't very pretty ;)
  
  I've been hacking on it on and off over the past week, and hope to have it good enough shape to shamelessly boast about it to more people :)
  



• GSoC - So, tomorrow is the deadline for submitting apps (which is likely to be extended following tradition ;). I submitted my abstract and proposal yesterday, and I'm currently keeping my fingers tightly crossed (along with the occasional running around in circles screaming and giggling at the same time).
  
  Steev and Patrick & Patrick and Steev have expressed interest in co-mentoring me (Gentoo projects have two mentors); let's see how everything turns out :)



• Satya also applied for GSoC this time. Her proposed project is the deceptively simple-looking idea to rewrite/extend Bootchart using Systemtap. Her mentor-if-she-gets-selected is Eugene Teo, who (going by what she's been telling me) has been an excellent (pre-project-acceptance) mentor; who is extremely patient, understanding, and an overall gem of a guy.



• GNOME 2.22.0 is (mostly) in-tree - The Gentoo GNOME Herd has almost completed moving GNOME 2.22 from the overlay to the tree. They have done a wonderful job by fixing a ton of bugs in just this month. As soon as all the bugs blocking the GNOME 2.22 tracker are resolved, and a few more reds converted to green on the gnome-2.22 status page, GNOME 2.22 will be unmasked, and users will be able to revel in the joy that is 2.22 :)



• Not The GWN - New issue released by Patrick!



• xulrunner-1.9 and mozilla-firefox-3 will be added to portage (p.masked) by armin76 when the beta5 is released :-)



• rohitj wrote an XChat plugin for dpaste (and has been bugging the rest of us to try it out for the past two days ;)



• More stuff that I can't remember :-/


Update: Another NTGWN issue released by Patrick :D

wth?

Gosh, it's been a month since I last blogged, and that too while this has been a very blogpost-philic month. FOSSKriti started and got over, freed.in was attended and praised for high-quality talks while the Indian FOSS community was boo-ed for low attendance at the same. FOSDEM came and went, and left several hundred hangovers in Europe.

I became aware of LinuxChix's Indian Chapter, was delighted to know about it, and decided to become a part of the community, and spread the word :)
I also became painfully aware of how much damage a vocal minority can do to a community that's starting up. I constantly winced during the flamewars on the Gentoo mailing lists during it's "Great Fall", as some have come to call it (though I disagree with them). Seeing the same munitions being deployed on the LC-IN ML gives me a depressing premonition of disaster.

The GDM 2.22 rewrite wasn't finished in time for inclusion in GNOME 2.22 (Hard Code Freeze), but gvfs managed to port more stuff and also get a "working" ftp backend, removing another bug from the 2.22 blocker bugs list.

The Xorg people were shouted at for not taking care of hald/dbus restarts, and patches were committed to fix the issue.

Gentoo Trustees were elected, and the results were expected and hilarious at the same time :-)
GSoC '08 was announced, and applications were invited from the various Open Source projects.
Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò framed his (and coincidentally my) thoughts about devs participating in GSoC (better than I could have) in a mail to the ML.

Beagle is still pondering about GSoC -- let's see how that turns out :)

*bheekling realises that the above paras are probably missing stuff, are somewhat anachronistic, terse, overflowing with links, and lacking continuity, but he believes that a jumbled-up link-eyebleed post is better than a forever procrastinated one :P