[Soc-coordination] Call for Projects & Mentors for Google Summer of Code 2012

[Niels Thykier]

On 2012-02-19 17:45, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Niels Thykier <niels at thykier.net> writes:
> 
>> I think we can dig out a project or two.  Actually, I already did...
>> Some of you may remember I suggested that we created the
>> "lintian-harness" frontend[1]. :)
> 
>> As I understood Ana on IRC, it could be useful to divide the project
>> into two parts.  A small "get started" part and a larger "the real deal"
>> part.  I was thinking something like:
> 
>>  1. part harness test-suite ("get started")
>>     - I got some sample scripts that might be useful for the student
>>       get started.
>>  2. part rewritten harness frontend ("the real deal")
>>     - Based on the spec in [1], but possible with some changes to it.
> 
>> Do people think this is a reasonable size for a project?
> 
> Yeah, I think that's a reasonably-sized project.  (And it would be great
> to have that done!)
> 

Okay, so I have tried to come up with a project description for [1].
This is what I got so far (including "inline wiki markup"):

<project>
Create Lintian reports frontend
===============================

The static package analysis tool, Lintian, is currently being run on
all packages in Debian.  It has a tool called "harness" to publish the
results of its quality checks on lintian.debian.org.

Currently, "harness" is an "internal" tool to generate these reports,
but we believe it would be useful to Debian as well as its many derivatives
to have a propper tool for generating these reports.

The project will consist of two parts.  Part 1 will be to create a
black box test suite to test the current harness tool.  Part 2 will be
to rewrite "harness" into a proper tool.


 * Confirmed Mentor: Niels Thykier
 * How to contact the mentor:
   * mail: niels at thykier.net,
   * IRC nick: nthykier
 * Co-mentors:  Any takers? :)
 * Deliverables of the project:
   * New automated harness test-suite
   * New harness frontend
 * Desirable skills:
   * Perl and POD
   * docbook (for the "User Manual")
   * Templates (such Text::Template or Template::Toolkit)
   * Black box testing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-box_testing)
   * Input sanitation.
   * Possibly some Make or some shell code (sh or bash).
   * Basic gnuplot knowledge (format of data files etc.)
 * What the student will learn:
     You will learn methods to reduce the workload when dealing massive
     data sets (via incremental runs).  You will learn how to do black
     box testing on "non-trivial" black boxes.
</project>

Review welcome, co-mentor welcome, suggestions very welcome and typo
fixes also welcome.

~Niels

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2012/Projects