[Soc-coordination] One month in

[Max Wiehle]

Hi all!

Am Donnerstag, den 26.06.2008, 09:49 +0100 schrieb Neil McGovern:
> Hi all!
> 
> It's now exactly one month since students began coding for their GSoC
> projects, and it's time to start thinking about mid-term evaluations.
> 
> 
> We're (the admin team) are being a little worried that we've not heared
> much recently, so please re-assure us that everything's going OK with a
> quick mail about how your student (or your mentor if you're a student
> and are reading this!) is getting on. We really need to know any
> problems, issues and progress sooner rather than later!
Because the list has been rather quiet and i haven't seen any report by
my mentor on this list so far (don't know what happened of list of
course) i thought i might summarize what i have been doing so far.
I am working on merging config files during upgrades.
( http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2008/MergeMaster )

In contrast to the description on the wiki i have not been trying to
port mergemaster but rather developing something similar for dpkg and
ucf. So far i have mainly focused on getting basic functions (check if
merging is possible, offer merged version, call external tools such as
meld) working and hooking them into both ucf and dpkg.

My current approach is a shell script (mcf) that is called from dpkg and
modifications in ucf - both of which source a file called mergecf that
contains the common functions. This offers the same ui for both dpkg and
ucf and is easy to develop and modify. However i will have to check with
the dpkg developers if this approach is fine with them.

The work i did in dpkg is based on the conffiles db that keeps the
original config files that are needed for merging.
( http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Proposals/ConffileDatabase )

So far i am quite happy with the functions added and i think they
actually offer a huge benefit. Therefore i would really like to see them
included in ucf and dpkg and i will partly work on that in the second
half of the soc. 

The second thing i will work on is including more flexible merging in
mergecf. That would include selecting changes to apply as well as
resolving conflicts. This is quite a challenge because the ui is limited
to debconf and shell q&a. Further more it has to work on the usuall
80x25 screen. So i think i will be able to develope a proof of concept
but it will take some more discussions and testing to see if this really
should be enabled by default. Especially since the external tools such
as meld are targeting exactly that kind of functionality - but some of
them only run on X.

THIS IS ONLY FOR TESTING PURPOSES !
You can find the git repositories i have been using at
git://git.debian.org/git/mergecf/mergecf and  
git://git.debian.org/git/mergecf/dpkg

Developement is happening in the try_merging and conffile-fun branches
- that is you will have to run 
git checkout -b try_merging origin/try_merging
to see the current state of the code. 

BE WARNED: DO NOT INSTALL THIS dpkg VERSION !
I renamed the ucf package and executables to ucf-ng so they don't mess
with the installed package management. For dpkg i decided not to install
the package and instead generated a symlink from /usr/bin/dpkg-ng to
dpkg in the buildpath. I only use this to install the ucf-ng package for
testing purposes! mcf currently does not do any file operations - so it
DOES NOT WORK YET. 

Both currently build fine for me with 
	git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new

Please drop me a line if you'd like to help testing. I will focus on
cleaning up the code and finishing some todo's during next week but
afterwards i would really love some feedback on how things work for
other people. 

And even if you don't want to help testing i'd like to hear what you
think about the approach so far - please contact me of list - because
the list probably is for "coordination" only. 

I think that's it for now.
Cheers,
 Max