[Soc-coordination] Google Summer of Code 2009: Debian's Shortlist

[Guillem Jover]

Hi!

On Fri, 2009-04-10 at 09:18:32 +0200, Obey Arthur Liu wrote:
> === And the details: ===
> ========================
> 
> * Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings *
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Student: Jonathan Yu, Mentor: (probably) Dominique Dumont *see below*
> 
> This project proposes a common library for parsing and manipulating
> Debian Control files, including control, copyright and changelog. Main
> ideas include validating and parsing of these files, with both Strict
> and Quirks modes for the parser. The second idea is a new frontend for
> Debconf using Qt4 (for which Perl bindings will be written).

I've some comments after checking the more detailed project proposal at:
<http://wiki.debian.org/jawnsy/Debian_Control_Files_Parsing_and_Editing_Library>

There's already several libraries to parse debian control and
changelog files, but I don't think there's anything for copyright as the
format is not yet standardized.

dpkg has a C library (albeit not yet public) for parsing and dumping
control-style files, and dpkg-dev has also perl modules supporting
control and changelog files. I'm also aware of apt's implementation in C++,
and there's others in python, ruby, etc.

There's also mention of rewritting debconf in C/C++, but that has also
already been done in the form of cdebconf.

regards,
guillem