[gentoo-soc] Re: Two ideas: R package installer (CRAN) and per-user daemons

[Auke Booij]

Alright, here's some proof I know how to use git. patch -p1 processes
it just fine on devmanual.git.

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 3:58 PM, Auke Booij <auke@××××××.com> wrote:
> Hey there,
>
> Google Summer of Code is slowly taking off, I'd like to claim a spot.
>
> Two ideas I'd like to expand on behalf of Gentoo are:
> 1. R package installer (also see gentoo-wiki.com). R has a lot of
> additional packages, so it is not feasible to manually create and
> maintain ebuilds for all of them. There are a number of databases
> containing these additional packages, including CRAN and Bioconductor.
> Three reasonable solutions are: 1. create a big ebuild with loads and
> loads of USE flags which compiles and installs the wanted R packages
> as one big package (not the best, since this is exactly what we want
> to avoid with Gentoo, and we would indeed need loads of use flags), 2.
> generate ebuilds for all packages (this would need regular running of
> scripts, and would probably need for its own overlay), 3. install to
> the filesystem without letting the package manager know about anything
> (ehm... I guess this is not a reasonable solution, after all). Are
> there any ideas about how to solve this, and how R usually installs
> them? Sebastien fabbro, I cc'd you, are you still interested in
> mentoring this?
>
> 2. Per-user daemons. Currently, there are some daemons, like
> PulseAudio, jackd, several download daemons, and soon possibly X.org
> (which will no longer need to run as root, and really should run as a
> normal user), which run as specific users, instead of root or a
> systemwide daemon-specific user. There is currently no framework for
> launching these daemons at all, and the current solution is to either
> make users figure out their own solution (a popular one is an extra
> line in .xinitrc), or to set the username in some conf.d file, thus
> disabling the possibility to run several of them for different users.
> I would like to develop an extension to our current init.d system
> which will enable users to write and start their own init scripts,
> which at first only run as themselves, not as another user. This would
> make it possible to cleanly launch several identical daemons for
> several users. This project would involve either writing a new
> additional init.d system, or extend our current system. I would like
> to know 1. if you guys are understanding a word of what I'm saying at
> all 2. if this would be an interesting idea (I think it is, of course)
> 3. anyone has any ideas or would like to mentor me.
>
> Thanks for your ideas.
> Auke Booij "tulcod".
>