[gentoo-soc] Week 9 Report for Big Data Infrastructure and H2O ebuilds Project

[Yuan Liao (Leo)]

Hi folks,

This week, I finally fulfilled the last deliverable in my project
description: Gentoo packages for the H2O machine learning platform.
ebuilds for the most critical components of the H2O platform,
including h2o-core, h2o-algos, the Target Encoder plugin and the H2O
Python module are available, and every ebuild supports compilation
from source.  Although some components, like XGBoost support, are yet
to be added because it has a giant dependency tree that consists of
lots of non-existent packages on Gentoo, I believe that with the
current framework of H2O ebuilds I have set up, anyone would be able
to create ebuilds for those packages easily in the future.

The H2O project itself employs Gradle as the build system, just like
the Kotlin programming language project.  Fortunately, the build
process of every H2O module I have touched is straightforward enough
to allow an ebuild for it to be created very conveniently.  For most
modules, Gradle's only pivotal duty is to resolve dependencies, and
the sources can be compiled with solely 'javac'.  On the other hand, a
few dependencies of H2O were not easy to package.  There was one
package whose source code was not even available and thus must be
shipped as a pre-built binary package; some other dependencies had C
sources to build for the Java Native Interface (JNI), but they could
not be compiled due to compiler errors for some reason, causing the
JNI portion of those packages to be shipped as pre-built binary at
this point.

Because I am moving to another city soon, I cannot work full-time next
week and therefore do not expect to make any more significant progress
for my project except small bug fixes, tweaks, and some work on
documentation.  However, this does not imply my departure from the
Gentoo community.  Unless I switch to another GNU/Linux distribution
(which is unlikely since Gentoo has been working great for me), I will
always be around.  I probably cannot devote very much time to Gentoo
improvements like during GSoC because my private affairs will keep my
busy, but I am still looking forward to occasionally submitting ebuild
pull requests when I encounter a bug that I know how to resolve and
making improvements on Gentoo Wiki, just like what I had done even
before applying for this year's GSoC.  And, should any deliverable of
my GSoC project be eligible to be adopted by Gentoo officially, I will
also be glad to find some time for any work required for this process.

Finally, I would like to thank Benda and fordfrog for their advice and
guidance: they are vital to my success in building the deliverables of
my GSoC project.  Thanks Zongyu for setting up a solid foundation of
an ebuild repository for Java packages; without his work on the Spark
overlay last year, I would have had spent more time creating packages
for transitive dependencies of Kotlin and H2O ebuilds.  Thanks vaukai
in the #gentoo-java IRC channel for tackling some Gentoo bugs I
encountered throughout my project.  Thanks AnAverageHuman in
#gentoo-java for providing visions of distribution-level Kotlin
support on Gentoo.  Last but not least, thanks to everyone who has
ever followed my project!

See you around,
Leo