Re: [gentoo-soc] Welcome GSoC Students!

[Marius Mauch]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:33:56 +0530
Anant Narayanan <anant@g.o> wrote:

> Welcome to Gentoo's edition of the Google Summer of Code, and
> congratulations on your selection! To get you started, here's some
> general information. This email should be followed by another email
> from your mentor giving you more specific details.

Ok, took me a bit longer than expected to get around to writing this
mail, hope that's no problem for you.
> Communicating

> 	The community bonding period begins now and the purpose is
> to familiarize you with our general community practices. It is *very
> important* that you are in constant touch with your mentor
> throughout the duration of the program. There are several channels
> of communication that Gentoo developers use, and we'll go through
> the most important of them:
>
> 	- Mailing Lists: gentoo-dev is the list where technical
> discussions related to Gentoo not suited for more specific lists
> takes place. We highly recommend you subscribe to this list and lurk
> for a while to get a feel of what kind of questions are asked on it.
> We would also like you to subscribe to the gentoo-soc mailing list in
> order to receive important announcements related to the program. In
> addition to these two lists, your mentor might also want you to
> subscribe to another list, depending on your project. A complete
> listing of all our mailing lists, along with information on how you
> can subscribe to them is available on:
> http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml

For mailing lists, I'd strongly suggest you subscribe at least to
gentoo-dev, gentoo-dev-announce (to stay in touch with the general
dev community), gentoo-portage-dev (for questions regarding your
project) and gentoo-soc (for SoC related stuff). Except for gentoo-dev
they all don't have a lot of traffic, so it should require a lot of
time to follow them.

> 	- IRC: A lot of Gentoo developers hang out in several
> channels on the Freenode IRC channel. IRC is generally used for
> real-time conversations and is very useful when you want a quick
> reply. The starting point for you should be the #gentoo-soc channel;
> your mentor will tell you which other channels you are recommended to
> join.

I've seen that you already hang out in #gentoo-portage, and that's
generally also the first place if yo have any portage (or gentoolkit)
related questions. Eventually you might also look into #gentoo-dev
(moderated, let me know if you want voice in there) or #gentoo-dev-help
for ebuild or other Gentoo related questions.
Of course you can also contact me via /msg at any time.
Note that I'm often not watching my IRC client when online, so it can
take some time before you get a reply. When it's important I suggest
you also send an email, or (if it's a more generic question) ask around
on one of the IRC channels/mailing lists. As said before, I'm located
in the CEST timezone (UTC+2), though that doesn't mean much for my IRC
availability. The best time to catch me is probably between 16:00 and
22:00 UTC, but that's no guarantee (also I sometimes won't be on IRC
for a couple of days, but I'll still read email).

> 	- Bugzilla: Gentoo maintains a bug database on: http://
> bugs.gentoo.org/. We recommend you sign up for an account there.
> Depending on your project, your mentor may expect you to file bugs
> and follow them. Whenever your project involves changes to code
> maintained by existing Gentoo developers, you will usually have to
> file a bug and follow it up. Your mentor will tell you whether or not
> you will be using Bugzilla, and if yes, to what extent.

While you don't have to file bugs to get your code "in", I'd suggest
that you take a close look at existing bugs regarding revdep-rebuild to
get a feeling for the problems it has. You might also want to watch the
tools-portage@g.o and/or dev-portage@g.o aliases in
bugzilla to get a feeling about how development is going on (that's
going to be a lot of traffic however).

> Code Management
> 	- Gentoo uses a mix of CVS, SVN and Git internally. We
> recommend you use an external code hosting service to help manage
> your code. Some of the popular ones are:
> http://code.google.com/hosting/(SVN), http://sourceforge.net/
> (CVS/SVN) and http://repo.or.cz/ (Git). One of the explicit aims of
> the Community Bonding period is to get you upto speed with the
> version control system you will be working with. Please contact your
> mentor for help *before* signing up with a particular service. In
> some cases, you may be expected to work on an existing repository -
> again - contact your mentor for specifics.

I don't really care what system or service you're going to use, as long
as it has a simple way for me to see the code (best via webinterface so
I can take a look even when not at my dev system). You're not going to
work in the portage repository for several (administrative) reasons, so
you'll have to track it via anonsvn.gentoo.org.
At the end of the project I'll expect some kind of patch that applies
against a specified (not too old) revision of the portage repository,
but that's not something to worry about now.

> Progress Reports
> 	- We will be expecting weekly progress reports from each of
> you at the very least. Feel free to report more often! Your mentor
> will tell you his preferred method of communication, but you must
> also post your weekly progress reports to the gentoo-soc mailing
> list, as well as on your blog for all to see. Make sure that you
> inform your mentor well in advance if you plan to be missing for a
> week or more (vacation, exams etc.)

For progress reports, it's sufficient if you CC me on the report to
the gentoo-soc list (I'm subscribed to the list, but a CC makes it
easier to find things later). I suggest you stick to a specific day of
the week for your progress reports, but it's no big deal if the
interval between reports varies a bit. Just if you haven't made any
reports for two weeks in a row without notification I'll start to worry.

Now for some advice regarding the early phase of your project:
- The first thing you have to do is to become very familiar with the
underlying problem as there are a lot of details there to understand. A
good starting point is the ld.so manpage to understand how the linker
works, also check bugzilla and the forums for some common problems
with revdep-rebuild. If you want to you could also take a look at the
new FEATURES=preserve-libs functionality in portage-2.2 for some code
that has a related purpose to your project, but for that you'll have to
actually dig into nasty portage code (and the current code will soon be
rewritten due to a number of conceptual problems).
- Actually read and understand revdep-rebuild (and eventually its
clones). One of the main problems you'll have to deal with are the
numerours details, corner cases and exceptions implemented there. Might
be worth to write a little spec about revdep-rebuild before you really
start coding (would also make evaluations a bit easier for me ;)
- Understand the portage subsystems you're going to use. That includes
the PackageSet interface as well as certain parts of the
portage.dbapi.vartree module (in particular the LibraryPackageMap
class, though I'm currently replacing that with a new LinkageMap class,
so you might want to wait a bit on that)

Other than that I suggest that we come together for a meeting on IRC
sometime during the next two weeks to come up with a roadmap until the
mid-term evaulations and discuss any questions you (or I) still have.
Let me know when you think would be a good time (I'm quite flexible as
long as it's between 16:00 and 0:00 UTC).

Oh, and welcome to Gentoo :)

Marius

-- 
Marius Mauch <google-soc@××××××.de>
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