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acme (189)

acme
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http://www.astray.com/
Leon Brocard (aka acme) is an orange-loving Perl eurohacker with many varied contributions to the Perl community, including the GraphViz module on the CPAN. YAPC::Europe was all his fault. He is still looking for a Perl Monger group he can start which begins with the letter 'D'.

Journal of acme (189)

Sunday April 16, 2006
09:16 AM

Google Summer of Code

[ #29337 ]

Summer is coming up, and so is the Google Summer of Code. We did well last year, but one thing I think we can improve is to have more project proposals. I particularly like the long list the FreeBSD project has managed to build.

So, I'd like your project ideas. What can be achieved in a few weeks of hacking that would be beneficial to your modules/projects/CPAN/life?


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  • PDL/piddle development in Pugs and/or further tweaks to the Perl5 version of the library would be quite useful. The library is incredibly useful for scientific work, and its inclusion in core is one of the things I'm most looking forward to in Perl6.
    • As far as I know, PDL development is pretty slow thesedays and I'm not sure that there is any Perl6/Pugs work in that area yet. Are there useful numerical/statistical C libraries that people are using instead?
      • The GNU Science Library may be worth looking at if you are thinking along the lines of a Perl wrapper. A few GSL pieces are used in PDL, but only a very limited subset. It would be nice to have a proper GSL binding for Perl - I don't know that there are any other bindings with the same functional coverage that this would provide.
  • What can be achieved in a few weeks of hacking

    I'd say eight weeks of hacking, for an average student.

    And yes, eight weeks of full time hacking. Given that Google are (generously) paying at a rate equivalent to $27,000 per year, my non-humble opinion is that any student not giving their full time attention is slacking. How many other student summer jobs pay $14/hour?

    • Actually, turns out I'm about a year out of date. SoC runs for 3 months [google.com] this year, so that's more like twelve weeks

      I really don't feel that the suggestions are sufficiently epic in scale. I believe we need to think bigger, such as:

      Integrate PPI into Eclipse to provide full Perl refactoring support
      (I've never used or needed to use Eclipse, but I assume that this is plausible and useful from perusing their documentation. See also Perl Needs Better Tools [perl.com])
      Check and when possible close every open Perl bug
  • I want another wiki. OK, yes yes, I know...

    But what I'd love to see is a wiki where a single instance of the wiki can be entirely contained in a single SQLite database file.

    And I mean everything that isn't environment specific. Non-environment configuration (auth rules etc), templates, images (if it has image support), and so on.

    I want my wiki to be one file. One file where if I have the admin password (which is contained in the one file) I can just hit "Download Wiki" on some admin page and it sends me the

    • TiddlyWiki [tiddlywiki.com]

      • One file.
      • Downloadable.
      • Wiki-like MicroContent chunks.
      • StuddlyCaps linking/titling of content chunks.
      • Everything is in that one web page on your USB stick drive.

      All made possible throught the magic of Javascript, HTML, and CSS.

      I'm using a TiddlyWiki [tiddlywiki.com] to track lots of little parts of a project, and d-cubed [dcubed.ca] to do GTD at work. (Google Group version update release [google.com])

    • That would hardly take 8 weeks of full-time hacking. It could be done in about three days of full-time hacking. Make that a week if you want a large array of bells and whistles, maybe.

      I mean, I built a wiki into the web app for my contract job by accident when I needed to make snippets of my templates user-editable. 20 minutes, one (name, content) table, 10 lines of straightforward code, 3 trivial queries in the DB layer and 10 sparse lines of template later I had something that took a life of its own as

      • And it had history? Or did you implement a scratchpad?

        Administrative code? User authentication? Template editing, image support?

        One of the features of wikis is you can write on in 5 minutes, or you can have people working full time for years (MediaWiki).

        And everything in between.

        And 8 weeks worth of features, in a one file wiki, would be nice.

        But I'll look at the one suggested above instead.

          • Didn’t have history at first, but does now. That was one of the new features. Took an hour or so.

          • User authentication was provided by the part of the app that was already in place, but that too is quite simple; it only takes appreciable time if you want finegrained permissions.

          • Not sure what template editing refers to.

          • I don’t have image support at the time being. Upload management would indeed be somewhat time-consuming to implement. (In my case though the work is already done in anothe

    • oddmuse http://www.oddmuse.org/ [oddmuse.org]
      It's one Perl file and content saved in files. a file based wiki is as good as a sqlite supported one.
  • Imagine for a moment, that you had access to all the metadata in or on CPAN.

    That is was trivially easy with almost no work, to relate authors, dists, modules, dependencies, testing failures, kwalitee, mirrors, RT bug reports, and all the other metrics for CPAN.

    The data is currently sitting in the CPAN index, in CPANTS data, in CPAN Tests data, all over the place, scaterred on 4 sites, and accessible sometimes only through the modules and APIs for those specific systems.

    You can access it, but you really have
  • I know someone's working on this, but I want something that's as transparent as CPAN.pm to work with it: install direct from Subversion, with a specified release/branch. (Am I showing my CVS roots?)
    • Install WHAT direct from WHICH subversion exactly?

      I mean, I just wrote a script for my current client which does that for the dozen non-CPAN (and a few CPAN) dists that need to be installed to set up a particular system.

      Takes a list of tarball names, pulls them from the /releases/ dir in subversion, perl Makefile.PL, make, make test, make install, setting PREFIX and PERL5LIB etc.

      It's maybe 100 lines and took 2 hours.

      While it might be nice to have a generalised form, I'm not sure it's makes for an 8 week pro

    • SVN4CPAN [scratchcomputing.com]? It’s abandoned, but the bits are there for the taking [scratchcomputing.com].

      That would indeed be very worthwhile.

      • Not really abandoned, just not economically feasible for an out-of-work plumber such as myself to spend lots of time on it while watching the account balance drift toward homelessness.

        I'll mentor any part of it for SoC. Watch this link [scratchcomputing.com] for updates.

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