GSOC 2017/Student Application Ilias95

Quick Introduction

The goal of this project is to provide centralized metrics for Fedora.

The Federated Message Bus or simply fedmsg is a python package and API defining a brokerless messaging architecture to send and receive messages to and from Fedora applications. For example, once a branch of a package is successfully built in koji a message will be emitted on the bus.

Datagrepper let us query for all kinds of historical data from fedmsg. It provides us with a JSON API for fedmsg which can be utilized by using HTTP GET requests. Many scripts are using this API to generate useful metrics. An example query for datagrepper could request all messages from the past 2 days that have been emitted from the wiki from a specific user.

The Problem

There are applications that have to make a dozen or more requests to datagrepper to try and find the 'latest' events from large awkward pages of results. Unfortunately, this process is very slow. Consequently, datagrepper is insufficient for some more advanced reporting and analysis that we would like to do.

At the moment, metrics collection in CommOps are collected using scripts which query the datagrepper API. This is very time consuming and requires a lot of manual work. After all, writing hacky scripts every time is a tedious process.

The Solution

To solve the above mentioned issues, statscache was built. Statscache is a daemon that sits listening to fedmsg-hub waiting for messages. When new messages arrive, it will pass them off to plugins that will calculate and store various statistics. If we want a new kind of statistic to be kept, we just write a new plugin for it. With statscache, we intend to have a centralized source for all metrics generation. By building on top of it, we can significantly reduce the number of scripts required to gather metrics to almost 0.

At the moment, statscache has no plugins for community related metrics.

The main purpose of this project is to build these plugins. Other goals include the development of a nice web interface for generating statistics, as well as the deployment of statscache along with the final deliverables on infracloud.

Benefits for Fedora

• A centralized source for all metrics generation.
• Useful metrics and statistics for FAS groups, users, events and more.
• Ability to generate and study weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly reports.
• Statistics in different formats (csv, svg, etc.).
• Eliminate the need to write scripts every time.

Schedule and Milestones

Implementing X -- first milestone (8 weeks)

Coding this (1 week)

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Documenting that (1 week)

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About Me

My name is Ilias Stamatis. I am a CS student in my final (4th) year at the Alexander Technological Institution of Thessaloniki, Greece.

I am a FOSS enthusiast and I have been actively contributing to the open source community for the last several years.

I have been using Linux for the last 7 years. I started with Ubuntu and then moved to Arch where I have stayed for 5 years now. In the meantime I am experimenting with a lot of different distributions. Although I had no prior experience with Fedora, I quickly set up my working environment on it and read Fedora-specific topics from the official documentation and the wiki pages. I'm here to stay!

Multilingual in Greek (Native), English (Fluent) and Spanish (Conversational).

Experience and Contributions

Projects

The majority of my personal projects (mostly written in Python, C and Java) can be found on my personal github profile: https://github.com/Ilias95

Example projects:

• FF Multi Converter (https://sites.google.com/site/ffmulticonverter/)

A graphical front-end for multimedia conversions on Linux developed using python and pyqt5.

This is the most successful open-source project of mine, since it has a continuously growing user base. It has also been packaged by the open source community for all popular Linux distributions and it has been translated to more than 20 languages.

• Apts (https://github.com/Ilias95/apts)

Implementation of a complete TFTP server using python and following the RFC 1350.

• Guitar chords (http://ilias952.pythonanywhere.com/)

A dynamic web application developed using django and modern web technologies such as AJAX, JQuery and Bootstrap.

Arch Linux Contributions

• Packages that I maintain in AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?SeB=m&K=Ilias95
• Contributions to the wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Special:Contributions/Ilias95
• Small contribution to the bug tracker: https://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?project=0&do=user&switch=1&id=20842

Why Fedora

I love Linux and I love Open Source. Fedora is a Linux distribution driven by a massive community made of volunteers around the world. I was always looking forward to making bigger and more significant contributions to such a large open-source project. Everything done here has a significant impact on the whole FOSS community and that motivates me even more. Last but not least, apart from Linux and OSS, I really love python and luckily Fedora seems to be sharing this feeling as well.

Inside Fedora I can offer my skills, knowledge and hard work and I definitely plan to continue contributing after the GSoC period. This will let me obtain new technical skills and gain significant experience on communication and collaboration with users and developers of such a large community.

Why This Project

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Why I Am a Good Fit for This Project

• Experience with a lot of open-source projects and the Linux ecosystem.

• Plenty of years of experience with python which is required for this project.

• Very familiar with collaboration and communication techniques such as version control, issue tracking, IRC, mailing lists, etc.

• Ability to take on new technologies with ease and quickly become efficient and productive.

• Really keen to engage with and contribute to such a software team, obtain new engineering skills and gain hands-on experience with real-world situations.

• FOSS enthusiast.

Other Commitments

I am following only 2 university courses this semester. My examination period is in June (no exact dates yet). I do not have other commitments until the 1st of September so I will be able to focus exclusively on this project.

Contact Info

Ilias Stamatis, stamatis.iliass <> gmail.com

My IRC nick is Ilias95 and you can find me at #389, #fedora-devel and #fedora-python.