Re: Guix to participate in the Google Summer of Code

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Hi Alex,

> I want to be a student this year since this will be my final chance (I
> am graduating this year). I look at the libreplanet page and I think
> only the build daemon project is suitable for me since I don't have
> knowledge in networking. Is it possible for me to work on last-year
> Bournish project?

The Bournish project is poorly defined now that gash exists, a Bash
interpreter written in Guile.  It wouldn’t be a lot of work to integrate
gash into Guix and replace Bournish; in fact I wanted to do this myself
in a few weeks.

I’m afraid that the Bournish project would no longer be suitable for
GSoC, and that’s why it had been removed from the list of project ideas.

The guix-daemon project is larger but also much more useful to us.
Garbage collection in the context of Guix is not very difficult to
understand.  The garbage collector may remove any item that has zero
users; the link count on a store item is indicative of the number of
users that item has.  For garbage collection you essentially go through
all items and check if the link count is zero.

The reference scanner is already implemented in the form of grafts.  The
code opens each file and searches efficiently for store references.

For that project it is best to spend a day or two browsing the existing
Guile sources and noting the many things that already implement large
parts of the daemon features.

--
Ricardo

GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6  2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC
https://elephly.net