Re: Want to work with a Linux Group
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 03:27:01PM +0200, Carsten Hey wrote:
>
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 10:32:13AM +0000, Roger Preston wrote:
> > I am keen to work for/with a Linux development group, though am not
> > sure where to start.
I'd start by asking what your major interests are. There's a lot
of free software projects out there you could contribute to; some
probably would interest you more than others.
> > I would describe myself as a competent C++ programmer, though perhaps
> > not quite at your levels yet.
>
> Other well known packages written in C++ are the KDE suite and apt.
> There is many more less known software written in C++ in Debian.
>
> apt is as far as I know the only package where Debian is upstream
> (together with Ubuntu) and which is written in C++, so trying to get
> involved in apt development might be an option for you.
libapt_pkg is also (IMO) in need of some work. I've wanted to use it
a few times, but the core functionality is not sufficiently abstracted
for use by anything except apt itself. For example, you can't download
package lists for arbitrary architectures, and you can't download without
using the cache--it is not geared to be used except for how apt uses it,
so the internal classes are not simple and generalised and reusable. If
you enjoy refactoring work, this is something that would be very useful,
I think.
schroot is also written in C++.
If virtualisation is of interest, I'm looking to add schroot support for
KVM (and Xen, if there's interest). You would need to be a competent
UNIX systems programmer. This is something I'm just in the process
of starting to think about, and will involve refactoring some of the
schroot internals in order to support it, including turning it from a
program run as a single invocation into a daemon to manage virtualised
systems and allow client connections. This would mean rethinking how
the locking code and session management work (it would actually become
simpler). git://git.debian.org/git/buildd-tools/schroot
Another easy-ish task that I want to do but lack the time is to
replace update-inetd with a script which uses /etc/inetd.d fragments
to put all inetd configuration under dpkg conffile management. This
isn't hard, but doing a smooth transition is a bit more work, and I
don't have the time to commit to it right ATM. I'd like to see this
done for Squeeze, though. Any takers?
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/03/msg00573.html and the
rest of the thread describe the problem.
This could be a very simple C++ program which simply reads all the
files in /etc/inetd.d and then writes out the configuration to
/var/lib/inetd/inetd.conf (for example). The language isn't too
important--you could do it in Perl just as well.
> If you don't find a proper package in C++ then C might be an option.
> There are nearly uncountable packages using C in Debian, finding one you
> are interested in should not be a problem.
Agreed.
Regards,
Roger
--
.''`. Roger Leigh
: :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
`. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
`- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
Reply to: