Re: GSoC GNU Hurd poject

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 08:27:57PM -0800, subin surendren wrote:

> I have a proposal to work on the "installer part" of the GNU Hurd. A
> few of my seniors did work on this project (GNU Hurd LX Installer)
> last year co-ordinating with Philip Charles of New Zealand.

Well, the whole story of the LX installer is a bit unfortunate: While
the goal of getting a nicer installer for the Hurd is laudable, the way
it was approach was not optimal. The problem is that there was no
communication with the rest the Hurd community up front.

As we already use Debian as our primary distribution, there is no point
in creating a completely new installer. It makes much more sense to just
port the new standard Debian Installer to work on the Hurd. (As opposed
to the "bootfloppies" presently used on the K* images, which is totally
obsolete, and never run natively under Hurd...)

When we informed the LX team of this situation, they expressed a desire
to work on porting the Debian installer; but we never heard back on
that...

Also, part of the plan was that the LX team would take over releasing of
the actual CD images from Phillip. Nothing seems to have happened on
that score either. We don't know what to make of that.

Anyways, we already considered adding "port Debian Installer to Hurd" to
our list of project ideas. However, this is a bit tricky: This task
requires interaction with both Hurd and Debian, and it's not quite clear
which of the two projects is more appropriate as mentoring organization.
Also, the mentor should ideally be familiar with both -- but the person
I had in mind refused.

(BTW, this project was already undertaken for GSoC two years ago through
the Debian organization, but failed totally...)

> The proposed team members (all classmates) are
> 
>        (1) Subin M (2) Manoj K M (3) Binu J Raj

Well, as others already pointed out: GSoC is really targetted at
individuals, not teams... If all of you apply individually, only one
would get selected. (Assuming you would be selected at all, that is :-)
)

What you could try to do, is to have one of you participate as the
official student, but do the work together and share the money. Not sure
how google would like that, though...

-antrik-