Re: Call for project proposals: Guix and Outreachy

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

>> 3. rewrite more things currently provided by bootstrap binaries in
>> guile to reduce our bootsrap binary base.
>
> This seems good, as it consists of many independent sub-projects.  On
> the other hand: we already have a couple of implementations that are
> just not used in Guix at this point.  For example, there are a couple of
> Guile implementations of tar out there (I remember Mark H Weaver posted
> one some years ago), and there’s even a Bash interpreter out there
> (written by Rutger).

Yes, I think this lends itself well to an internship because it’s very
much a step-by-step project: one could focus on Bash, or on tar, or awk,
etc.

>> 10. provide user interface to our build farm where we could request
>> building a specific package.
>
> A user interface to the build farm would generally be useful.  I don’t
> see how it would keep someone busy for three months, but I think this
> proposal is worth fleshing out.

Right.  Depending on how far we want to go, it could definitely keep
someone busy for some time.

We could have an HTTP interface allowing users to request a build.
That’s not trivial because we’d need authentication, a notification
mechanism, and generally giving some thought to the security
implications of this.

We could also add new monitoring HTTP interfaces that would provide info
not available through the existing /api/* interfaces.  For instance,
having something that would show the build machines used, how
well-balanced the load is, and so on.  Or generally having ways to
browse builds in different ways—by evaluation ID, by commit, by name,
etc.

Ludo’.