Distributions in the Summer of Code

For the fourth year, Google's Summer of Code will pay undergraduate students to work with some of the world's top developers on open-source projects. Students and mentors also get a T-shirt, which for many of us is motivation enough. Many of the accepted projects are not surprising, such as GNOME, KDE, Drupal, and Python. One interesting category of projects, however, is distributions. Aren't they just writing packages? What would they do with a Summer of Code project? That's what this article aims to discover.

This year, four distributions were accepted for a combined total of 40 slots: Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, and openSUSE. Conspicuous in their absence are other major distributions such as Mandriva and Ubuntu. One wonders what happened—did they apply (if not, how come?); were they rejected? Ubuntu participated in 2006 and 2007, so it is curious that the distribution is not in SoC this year. In addition to these four distributions, three of the BSDs participated as well, receiving a combined total of 35 slots: DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD. Since these are operating systems in addition to their own package distributions, many of their slots are devoted to core OS code, while the Linux distributions' slots are not.

Let's take a closer look at the types of distribution projects in this year's Summer of Code. Many of Debian's 12 projects relate to installation (two slots), configuration management (two slots), or package management/development (seven slots). The exception is a project to make an embedded, Debian-based NAS device.

Another 12 slots went to Fedora, which shared two of its slots with JBoss. Fedora has a more eclectic mix: it devoted two slots to package management and two to configuration management, investing the remaining slots in features for a translation framework (three), creation of a new Web interface for the hardware profiler Smolt, enhancement of the booting profiler Bootchart to use SystemTap, and creation of a simple, non-linear video editor for ogg video to integrate with the screencasting tool recordmydesktop.

Gentoo received six slots, of which two relate to package management. The other four are dedicated to diverse projects: implementing OpenPAM-compatible modules for Linux, improving a Web-based, WYSIWYG XML editor, making it easy to set up a Beowulf cluster, and improving Gentoo's embedded network-appliance framework.

OpenSUSE got ten slots; five of these are going toward package management/development, and one is going toward installation. The remaining four are the most generally interesting: implementing a face-based authentication module, enabling ext4 as GRUB's boot partition, interactive crash analysis (presumably an improvement upon what recent GNOME versions do rather than a duplication), and creation of a GUI manager for LTSP thin clients.

Now let's take a quick look at BSD land. Of DragonFly's projects, six out of seven are OS-related, and the other is installation-related. FreeBSD received 21 slots, of which many are devoted to the core OS—of the rest, four are related to package management/development, and one aims to improve Wine support. NetBSD received 14 slots, of which many again went to the core OS. Other than that, one slot went to installation and another to package management.

Distributions and "mixed" distributions/OSs unsurprisingly devote a large quantity of their efforts to their core competencies of package management, configuration management, and installation. At least in the Summer of Code, however, they do devote a significant amount of effort to solving larger problems that affect people outside the distribution.