Re: Call for project proposals: Guix and Outreachy

[Alex Sassmannshausen]

Hi Ricardo,

Ricardo Wurmus writes:

> 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.

This is great news — well done for taking the initiative.

> 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.

I have read through the documentation and I believe I would be able to
commit to the duties of being a mentor / co-mentor.

I would be happy to send more details of where I believe my relative
strengths and weaknesses in this project would be.  I couldn't see an
appropriate place for that on the outreachy website — would it be best
to discuss this by email with you two?  Or on list?

> 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.

Wrt to project ideas, if I understand the target audience right, I would
propose perhaps as one project a strengthening of the Guile tooling
around Guix.

Starter tasks could be helping to package and review existing packages
of Guile software for Guix.

Actual project tasks could revolve around developing a nice Guile build
system for Guix.

First steps would be perhaps to enhance the gnu-build-system with
additional phases for Guile specific tasks (setting the Guile site path
correctly, ensuring guile dependencies are propagated inputs…)

A second step might be a simplified Guile build system, which does not
rely on autotools infrastructure.  I believe this was discussed in the
past: it would be a "beginners build system" for *Guile only* packages
for quick and easy sharing in the Guix community.

Finally we might look at first steps to generate guix package recipes
from guile projects.  A first step might be a well-defined script that
generates a new project filetree, and writes a guix.scm file within it
that contains a Guix recipe using the beginners guile build system.

What do you think?

Alex