[Soc-coordination] Idea: Results Update for Publicity

[Erich Schubert]

Hi Cameron,
There was a proposal earlier to write up some 'Debian GSoC success
stories' for inclusion in the official GSoC blog and/or LWN.net

IMHO this would be really great, and in fact your project, sounds like a
very interesting topic for this. I bet some of the other distributions
for example would be very interested in your progress, and maybe some
other projects as well (e.g. using bittorrent to transfer level maps for
3D games, whatever - regular BitTorrent is kind of designed around the
user to select a particular torrent to download, not for a computer
application to pick (many) torrents it is interested in, and your
progress is an interesting enhancement of the BitTorrent approach)

In my opinion, your project is a great example of actual development
that needs to happen inside of distributions such as Debian. It can give
quite some insight to the role of a distributor as both a reliable (as
in 'available and fast'), easy to use (as in 'apt-get safe-upgrade') and
secure (as in 'trust') source for software updates, and the task of
getting these files to millions of users. I guess for some people we're
still not much more than just someone running "make install" for users
and making nice tarballs of the result, maybe annotated with some
dependency information.

In fact it would be interesting to do a "a distributors life" kind of
post, including all of our GSoC projects:
your debtorrent (file/update distribution infrastructure), bug triage &
web-debbugs & mole (user request management, upstream synchronization,
metadata management), QEMU update testing & CD Image testing & piuparts
(quality assurance), OVAL (security infrastructure), live-helper GUI
(distributor infrastructure) - they all fit well into the list of things
a distributor needs to take care of.
IMHO giving an overview of these projects (along with a progress report)
could give some people a good insight into what a 'distribution' has to
deal with, and how that goes way beyond finding good "./configure"
parameters and running "make install" in a chroot to make a nice tarball
from. Even dependency handling on installation is just one tiny piece of
the cake...

Just my € 0.02 - I'd really appreciate a result report of your project
for the Google GSoC blog and/or LWN.net; we can always use some good
publicity.

best regards,
Erich Schubert
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