[gentoo-soc] Project Proposal : GenCC for "Gentoo Community Compiling"

[Antoine Pinsard]

Hello Gentoo!

My name is Antoine Pinsard, I am a 21 years old French student in
computer science.

I made my first steps in the GNU/Linux community in 2008 starting with
Ubuntu. Two years later I migrated to Debian and two more years later I
went to Gentoo. Today I am running Gentoo on my laptop and trying Funtoo
on my desktop computer.

My first attraction to the IT world was programming and especially for
the web. But since I am using GNU/Linux, I am more and more interested
in system administration, software/hardware optimization and networking
(including security).

Since last year I'm trying to get involved in the open-source community.
Actually I didn't do many things for now: I subscribed an FSF student
membership ; I reported some bugs on some free software ; And a few days
ago I wrote a tool to manage use flags (which is currently discussed in
the Gentoo Chat forum).

I have heard about the Google Summer of Code last week for the first
time and I think this is a chance for me to both learn how to "work
open-source" and get an interesting job this summer.

So, as no project was submitted yet, I'd like to offer mine. This is an
idea I just had so I didn't go further yet. I would like to have your
opinion first.

The project is to make a tool to ease and encourage cross compiling
between Gentoo users. Basically, there would be two programs:

 * genccd, a daemon that any Gentoo (or derived) root user could start
and which wait for external requests to process a compilation.
 * gencc, a tool that looks for the nearest computers running genccd and
ask them to process a part of the job required by the command passed as
parameter. (e.g `gencc emerge -uDN --with-bdeps=y @world`).

This is a very basic approach of the tool but I think it gives the main
idea of the projet. I would like to have your opinion on whether it
could be a gsoc project or not. And if it could, what backgrounds it
would require. I think this is much more about networking and security
than compiling (though it would require at least a basic knowledge of
distcc).

Thanks in advance,

Antoine Pinsard