GSOC 2012/Student Application ruvolof

Contact Information

Email Address: ruvolof@gmail.com

Telephone: +393294918501

Blog URL: I don't have a blog yet. My personal site is www.francescoruvolo.it (italian, sorry), but I'm going to open a blog on blog.francescoruvolo.it as it is needed for the project (I'll do it in english)

Freenode IRC Nick: Zagorax

Why do you want to work with the Fedora Project? If you ask me today how I see my future, I'll answer that I see myself working as system administrator for an organization involved in open source project. Red Hat name always comes out when I imagine my future.

Do you have any past involvement with the Fedora project or another open source project as a contributor? Since two years I'm contributing with Ubuntu community as beta tester for newer release. You can find more, but not much, here: https://launchpad.net/~ruvolof. This one will be my first experience as programmer.

Did you participate with the past GSoC programs, if so which years, which organizations? No.

Will you continue contributing/ supporting the Fedora project after the GSoC 2012 program, if yes, which team(s), you are interested with? Did you read point one? Of course I am. I'm interested in Administrator group.

Why should we choose you over other applicants? My studies were quite different from what I'm applying now. I studied Greek and Latin and I graduated in philosophy. Now I'm studying computer science since six month. Everything I know about computer science was self-taught and I will not waste my first chance to really test my skill. I'll do my best to accomplish the task, you bet.

Proposal Description

Overview: I will follow Tim Flink in his proposal of building an online service to build Fedora testing images.

Why? Live systems are great. A lot of people (almost every end-user) try a live session before installing the system to check if it works good on their desktop or laptop. Introducing this system in testing is very useful, too. With this system will be very easy to test if a newer version of a package breaks something and it can be helpful also when testing multiple package to understand which one is to blame.

Details: The system will support the customization of boot.iso as main priority and will support Live Images and DVDs if time will be enough (and I'm not excluding to continue to work on this project after the end of GSoC). The user will be able to select package from all fedora repository, so he will be able to test different stable package set, as well as mixing stable package with testing ones (or testing a whole unstable system). It will uses lorax for image building (as it will be used until F18). If time is enough, I'll try add livecd-creator support, too.

How you intend to implement your proposal: The platform will be written in python. Trough a web interface the user will be able to select package he wants to test. The server will collect these information and will send them to another machine to elaborate and build the image (the other machine will be probably a virtual one running the appropriate fedora release, but maybe I'll find a cleaner solution after a bit of studying). Once build, the image will be sent back to the main server ready for the user to download. The user will receive an email notification when the process is finished. An admin will receive an email notification with a log when something goes wrong.

Timeline:

23 April to 20 May: studying all the things I need to realize this project and starting prototyping.

21 May to 15 June: working on the web interface to collect data and send them to the client.

16 June to 20 July: working on the image building process and the upload process.

1 August to 10: final testing and documentation writing.

'''Have you communicated with a potential mentor? If so, who?''' Yes, I contacted Tim Flink.