GSoC Students Rockin' Ready!

We reached the conclusion of yet another Google Summer of Code. Our students and mentors put in a lot of effort, writing and reviewing code, documenting it and in the process and sharing and learning a lot. We’d like to share with you some of the experiences of our students, mentors and of course the state of the projects!

Nine out of twelve

Like previous years, we have our share of ups and downs, but in the end we completed nine of the twelve projects successfully. Following is a short summary of the work done over the summer, along with the experiences of the students and the mentors.

Project Git Review

Xystushi created a Git review system. A lot of code has been refactored from ground up, important bugs fixed and new features have been added. In his words, GSoC was an amazing experience. The code is hosted on github.

Project AppArmor Profiling

Kshitij worked on creating tools for AppArmor Profiling. The command line versions have been created for all the tools. There were some setbacks on the YaST based GUI front-end, but the overall project was successful. Kshitij plans to complete the GUI based tools in the coming weeks. The code is hosted at launchpad.

Project “Automatic Resize of LVM Volumes”

Akif Khan wrote a standalone application that can perform automatic resizing of File System and Logical Volumes. This tool can be called by the package manager during installation on encountering low space exception. This tool can also perform automatic resizing if the free space required by a user for a particular volume decreases below a certain level. According to Akif, it was an incredible learning experience for him, and he got to know a lot about the openSUSE Community as a whole. The code can be found on github.

Project “Music App for ownCloud”

The music app for owCloud lets you scan, browse and listen to your music. The final release is scheduled for the next ownCloud release. The student Morris Jobke noted that the project was very exciting and that he learned a lot in developing for a large project like ownCloud community.

Project Hedgewars Campaign Mission

Periklis Natansis wrote a new campaign mission for Hedgewars, which is about a hedgehogs’ journey in the stars to save his home planet. The camaign is said to be great fun and will be included in the next Hedgewars release for all to enjoy!

Project Syslog-ng MySQL Destination

Gyula Petrovics wrote a MySQL destination driver for syslog-ng. Victor Tusa, the mentor of the project writes that though the start of the project was slow, everything worked out well in the end, thanks to face to face meetings with the student. Gyula has successfully finished the project!

Project Syslog-ng Redis Destination

Tihamér Petrovics created a Redis Destination for syslog-ng. The project can be found at github.

The other projects that were successful were:

1.) OBS Discussion System by Shayon Mukherjee (Author of this article. He plans to elaborate on his project from his blog) 2.) OSEM by Stella Rouzi (all oSC visitors have seen OSEM in action, as it was used to successfully register them, submit the talks, schedule and view them and help plan the event!) 3.) User Management Application for ownCloud by Raghu Nayyar

Special Mention

A special word of appreciation goes to Intijik, our GSoC student working on the Iaas Cloud Framework project. He suffered from adverse health issues from the outset of the program till the midterm. Despite this, his mentor, Robert Schweikert, told us he did not give up and worked very hard. Unfortunately, due to the time lost, his project was not completed successfully, but his effort is really inspiring and worthy of appreciation. He still intends to carry on contributing to the project and Robert and the rest of us are proud of him!

Conclusion

It was a nice experience working for this summer. A lot of thanks to all mentors, who took out valuable time out of their busy schedules for the students. We can improve in lots of places, and come back better next year! Our representatives at the Mentor Summit (on October 19th and 20th at the Google Office) will discuss with mentors from other organizations about their experiences, and how we can make GSoC a better experience. Over and out from the GSoC team, until next year!

Article by Shayon Mukherjee!