[Soc-coordination] project idea: PTS rewrite in Django

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Heya, just to inform that myself and Raphael Hertzog (Cc:-ed) have just
added a project idea about a dynamic (and more hackable) PTS rewrite in
Django.

Below you can find a text dump of the proposal for discussion here.

Cheers.

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Title: PTS rewrite in Django

Description of the project: the Package Tracking System (PTS) is the
  main, source package-centric portal for Quality Assurance and package
  monitoring in Debian. It is widely used and in good shape. However,
  the technology it has been built upon is starting to show its age;
  also, the PTS currently uses a wide range of technologies (Python,
  Perl, shell script, XML, XSLT, ...) making it more hard to hack on
  than needed, in particular if you consider which technologies are
  nowadays popular in the Debian community. Finally, the current design
  of the PTS is entirely static, with refreshes occurring 4 times a
  day. That is good for performance, but it is a blocker for making the
  PTS a "live" data monitor and makes it unnecessarily hard to scale up
  to more frequent data updates. The content is also very
  Debian-specific and makes it unnecessarily difficult to setup a PTS
  instance for a Debian derivative for example. A more modular approach
  should be possible. This project aims at providing a new, alternative
  implementation of the PTS, using technologies that are popular in
  Debian (Python + Django), and getting rid of blockers for future
  evolution of the PTS, most notably the ability to provide live updates
  and to customize the content by enabling/disabling modules.

Confirmed Mentor: Raphael Hertzog (PTS original author and long-time maintainer)

How to contact the mentor: hertzog at debian.org

Confirmed co-mentors: Stefano Zacchiroli (PTS long-time co-maintainer), contact: zack at debian.org

Deliverables of the project: drop-in PTS replacement written in Python
  using the Django web framework. It should be possible to run the new
  implementation locally, obtaining pages (and features, most notably:
  mail subscriptions) equivalent to the current ones. Time permitting,
  some scalability assessment might be desirable. It's to be expected
  that parts of the dynamic content should be cached (using Django's
  cache feature) to provide a good compromise between freshness and
  performance.  Desirable skills: experience in Python+Django
  development, familiarity with the PTS current implementation (please
  include in your application a patch to the current PTS code that adds
  a bullet with your name under the "todo" section of each package page)
  What the student will learn: developing a large and popular dynamic
  web application; migrating an existing and in production code base to
  an alternative implementation; (time permitting) doing performance
  assessments of static vs dynamic websites
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-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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