Re: [gentoo-soc] Week 6 Report for Big Data Infrastructure and H2O ebuilds Project

[Yuan Liao (Leo)]

> Thanks!  We actually don't really care much about Java (haven't used it
> seriously since College), and haven't even been involved in Gentoo GSoC
> in a decade, but we're glad we stay on this list for things like this.
> It's really nice seeing someone who still has that spark of interest in
> computer things.  We do happen to like graph theory and network analysis
> and time complexity and such, but haven't really been able to apply it
> in "the real world" of tech companies.  Every time we try to do things
> "the right way" with real computer science, coworkers and bosses just
> say "just hack something together".
>
>
> Oh well, thanks for what you're doing,
>
> -A

It is wonderful to hear from people who have been involved in Gentoo
GSoC before!  Thanks for sharing this with us.  I guess it would be
reasonable to say that little of the knowledge pertaining to low-level
details taught in the classroom could have a chance to be applied in
solving a real-world problem.  I was wrecked by a self-balancing tree
implementation problem in my midterm exam for a data structure class,
but that would not affect my ability to write a working program which
uses self-balancing trees because I can just borrow an existing
implementation of the data structure built by others.  That said,
knowing how things happen under the hood is still useful in
programming and optimizing for efficiency.

Thanks,
Leo

On Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 10:39 AM A Schenck <lane_andrew@×××××××.com> wrote:
>
> On 7/18/21 10:52 PM, Yuan Liao (Leo) wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > <snip/>
> >
> > As per my original project proposal, I am also adding a test case for
> > the ebuild installation tests which will ensure every package in the
> > Spark overlay can be installed at least once.  Adding every package to
> > the emerge command theoretically works, but the command would be too
> > long.  Invoking emerge separately for each package would resolve this
> > problem, but the overhead of emerge's dependency calculation would
> > seriously impact the test runtime.  I came up with a solution that
> > could address both issues: write a script to compute a list of leaf
> > packages in the Spark overlay and pass the packages in the list to
> > emerge, so every package in the overlay would be installed, and the
> > emerge command can be simplified to have a shorter length too.   The
> > script can also act as a helpful tool for any ebuild repository's
> > maintainers to find out all leaf packages in the repository for
> > maintenance tasks like last-rite and package clean-up.  After some
> > initial optimization and tuning, the script (written in Python) can
> > compute a list of leaf packages among about 500 packages in the Spark
> > overlay within only a few minutes.  The optimization and tuning is
> > also the topic for this week's blog post of mine [1].  This post
> > covers some knowledge and topics from computer science, including
> > graph theory, graph algorithms, data structure, and time complexity.
> > If you are interested in any of those subjects, make sure you don't
> > miss it!
>
> Thanks!  We actually don't really care much about Java (haven't used it
> seriously since College), and haven't even been involved in Gentoo GSoC
> in a decade, but we're glad we stay on this list for things like this.
> It's really nice seeing someone who still has that spark of interest in
> computer things.  We do happen to like graph theory and network analysis
> and time complexity and such, but haven't really been able to apply it
> in "the real world" of tech companies.  Every time we try to do things
> "the right way" with real computer science, coworkers and bosses just
> say "just hack something together".
>
>
> Oh well, thanks for what you're doing,
>
> -A
>
> >
> > <snip/>
> >
> > This concludes my work during the past week and this report.  Thank
> > you for reading it (and my blog post in case you are checking it out)!
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Leo
> >
> > [1]: https://leo3418.github.io/2021/07/18/find-leaf-packages.html
> > [2]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Leo3418/Kotlin/Package_Maintainer_Guide
> >
>