The Debian project is proud that it has been accepted by Google as a mentor organization for this year's Summer of Code program, with nine tasks in total. Google will fund the students mentioned below to work full time on these tasks during their summer vacation, from May 28th to August 20th. They will be guided and evaluated during this time by active Debian developers.
The main focus of all the student tasks is to create or improve utilities that assist developers working on Debian packages and the Debian release. Several tasks cover communication between software authors, users and Debian developers. A number of tasks target quality assurance and improved testing, while others will result in new tools that help maintain Debian systems.
In particular the following tasks and students have been accepted:
Jeroen van Wolffelaar will implement Mole, an infrastructure for
managing information. This will help make Debian's vast supply of
data easier accessible to developers and users. Included are
package history and release statistics.
Ian Haken will write tools to use QEMU, a virtual machine emulator,
to test upgrades from one Debian release to the next without having
to re-install a real machine. This will help automatically track
down possible bugs in upgrade cycles.
Ana Beatriz Guerrero López will improve piuparts, a tool that helps
testing and improving the quality of package installation, upgrade
and removal scripts.
Gustavo Rezende Montesino will work on a bug triage and forward tool
that will help developers deal more effectively with tracking bugs
and interacting with bug reporters and upstream bug tracking
systems.
Cameron Dale will expand a BitTorrent application to work
effectively with large, constantly updating collections of files
such as the Debian archive, and create a backend or proxy to the
Debian package distribution tool APT to access it.
Pavel Vinogradov will develop a status monitoring system for
security management of clusters of Debian systems. It is based on
the OVAL language, which provides a uniform mechanism to report on
and control security centrally.
Margarita Manterola Rivero will work on a web-based user interface
to the Debian bug tracking system which will make it easier for
users to report, check and manipulate bugs.
Martín Hernán Ferrari will implement a modular CD and DVD image
testing tool that will allow automated testing of Debian CD and DVD
images as they are produced.
Chris Lamb will implement a graphical user interface for building
live Debian systems. This will make it much easier to generate
Debian systems that boot and work directly from a CD/DVD.
Debian's tasks are listed in the Debian Wiki at
http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2007
The Summer of Code is documented on Google's website at
http://code.google.com/soc/