[gnap-dev] [RFC] Summer of Code Proposal: GNAP Love

[Philipp Riegger]

Good morning,

I have some ideas for Summer of Code which i'd like to discuss with you.

I'm mostly interested in making GNAP usable and my proposal includes
lots of tasks in GNAP and catalyst, of which i'd like to finish as many
as possible and do some research on the rest.

catalyst tasks:

• Squashfs snapshot support
I don't like it, that it takes so much time to unpack a new snapshot and
it takes so much disk space to store it. Plan is: distribute tree
snapshots as squashfs images, mount them directly into the workdir,
use /mnt/distfiles and /mnt/packages instead of snapshot subdirectories.

• (Squashfs seedstage support)
Maybe the same is possible for stages? A future plan for this could be
to mount the squashfs image directly and use unionfs for the real work,
but i have no idea how deleting files in such a setup works. Research is
necessary here.

• uclibc-cross-compiling support
Cross compiling is hard, but it should be possible to build arch-uclibc
from arch. Research, what needs to be done combined with the
implementation, if possible. This would also make GNAP more flexible.

• Documentation
In an email from some days ago i read, that documentation is planed for
after the release. I could support this and proofread it, since i need
the knowledge anyway.

• (Code cleanups)
I write this everywhere, but since i need a basic understanding, i have
to read (parts of) the source and maybe i find something worth
improving.

• Cross compiling research
This is the continuation of the uclibc stuff with some plans on what
could be done how.

• Non-root builds research
Wouldn't it be nice if being root was not necessary for using catalyst?
I would like to look into the possibilities there and what is needed to
make it reality.


GNAP tasks:

• Code/Tree hosting, VCS
I've done some work last year and that does only exist as some patches,
since there is no central repository for GNAP development. First i'd
like to establish one and move all existing resources there.

• GNAP 2.1
There are some known and easy to fix bugs in GNAP 2.0. There have also
been some code cleanups. The last thing is, that the current GNAP is not
really usable, since the tree snapshot is so old, that most of the
distfiles are not fetchable from mirrors or other places. So i'd like to
make a new release, be it in the tree or in an overlay.

• Reimplementation in python research
Catalyst is written in python, maybe we could make better use of it if
we reimplemented some parts of GNAP in python? This is just a research
item, i'd like to look into it and form some statement about it. I'll
probably not do it.

• uclibc-cross-compiling support
This depends on catalyst.

• (Cross-compiling support)
My last years project. My thoughts/plans about that should be discussed
with the community and put on the GNAP development website.

• GNAP releases, long term support
This is just an idea i have. Think of something like this: With each
gentoo release, we take the release snapshot, form our reduced GNAP
snapshot (only supported profiles, unsupported USE flags masked,
unneeded ebuilds (X, desktop stuff) not in the tree) and support it for
some time security wise (like the releng team does during release). This
is more of a research topic, with informing what needs to be done,
writing of scripts, maybe doing a proof of concept (maintaining a
snapshot for some weeks to see how it works).


Thanks for reading this, any comments are welcome, constructive,
destructive, "this is not necessary" and "i like to see this one", and
most of all "i/we've been working on this with the following results".
This is not about occupying me, this is about helping.

I set the Reply-To to gnap-dev, you're welcome to join there, it's
really really low traffic at the moment.

Philipp

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