From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ricardo Wurmus Subject: Re: Call for project proposals: Guix and Outreachy Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2018 23:05:34 +0100 Message-ID: <87zi4lg4ep.fsf@elephly.net> References: <87fu6y27re.fsf@elephly.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:55161) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ejBbn-0001DZ-Pl for guix-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 06 Feb 2018 17:21:01 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ejBbi-00039Q-LW for guix-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 06 Feb 2018 17:20:59 -0500 Received: from sender-of-o51.zoho.com ([135.84.80.216]:21076) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ejBbi-00037Q-En for guix-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 06 Feb 2018 17:20:54 -0500 In-reply-to: <87fu6y27re.fsf@elephly.net> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: guix-devel@gnu.org Hi Guix, some weeks ago I wrote this: > on behalf of the Guix community I submitted an application for this > project to participate in Outreachy, an internship project for people > from sections of the population that are commonly underrepresented in > the world of free software development. > > Our application is currently undergoing review. If accepted we will > fund one intern for the upcoming internship period between May and > August. > > The Guix community already has a landing page on the Outreachy website: > > https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/gnu-guix/ > > You can already submit project proposals on this page, which Ludo and I > would review and approve. Please consider becoming a co-mentor for a > project to make our ongoing participation in Outreachy a success. > > Feel free to discuss project ideas right here before submitting an > official proposal. Project ideas for the Google Summer of Code are > equally valid for an Outreachy internship. The application process in which interns pick a community to work with will start very soon. Before we can be accepted as a participating community we need to submit at least one project proposal and have identified and approved a mentor. So far we have received one project idea relating to writing a Guile build system and recovering some of the potluck ideas, and I=E2=80=99d like= to propose another one: * User interface improvements As a source-based package manager, Guix builds packages from source when no binaries are available to substitute the local build. The resulting pages of compiler output can be very disorienting and confusing to users. The immediate goal of this project is to implement the means to let Guix direct all build output to a log file in a well-known directory, and report only the build/installation progress to users. This should at least be done for =E2=80=9Cguix package=E2=80=9D; =E2=80=9Cg= uix build=E2=80=9D may still print all output by default. Verbosity should be controllable with command line options. As a first task, the intern may want to implement coloured output for the printing of daemon messages, while leaving the compiler output unchanged. A second tasks could be to modify the daemon to keep logs also for failed builds. Currently, logs are only kept for successful builds. As a next step all output between build phases ought to be hidden by default. Only the daemon messages announcing the start and completion of build phases should be printed. An extra challenge is to allow for more progress information to be collected and reported. Cmake, for example, usually reports build progress as a percentage on each line. Presenting the Cmake percentage output as a progress bar can be a first step towards this goal. The GNU build system, however, does not report any progress. The intern could experiment with ideas to estimate the total number of build steps and then compute the progress as the build phase is executed. Finally the progress can be represented as a progress bar. This project is composed of smaller tasks that are almost indepedent. The completion of any of these tasks would give the intern more insight into how to complete the remaining tasks. The completion of any subset of these tasks would be a valuable contribution to GNU Guix. I would serve as the primary mentor for this project. I=E2=80=99d like to encourage you to volunteer to dedicate some time to support this project as a co-mentor, which involves attending weekly short online meetings and providing guidance to the intern. What do you think? -- Ricardo GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6 2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC https://elephly.net