Applications are still open until March 26th.

Note: the following is my personal opinion; I’m not the coordinator of the Debian GSoC project, and others might disagree.

Debian has received a couple of applications, but there were rather few among them I found really convincing. :-(

What I usually dislike in applications:

  • doesn’t state an actual project (yes, this happens, we nuke them pretty quickly. “Debian for my life” is not a real project, you know…)
  • isn’t related to Debian. For example “face recognition PAM module” certainly is an interesting topic, but I don’t think Debian is the appropriate organization to mentor this. We aren’t an organization of image recognition experts, but our key strength is distribution infrastructure.
  • doesn’t say much more than the suggested topic already did (note that for such ‘popular’ topics from the Wiki we usually receive more than one application; so adding some good ideas yourself or at least writing a good plan is key to being accepted!)
  • doesn’t give the impression of having done some basic background research, such as having searched in the Debian packages repository with “apt-cache search”

So if your application is really Debian-related, invest a few hours in writing the application and your chances are pretty good at being accepted!

Of course Debian could be an Umbrella for e.g. another network configuration GUI, a tool to configure traffic shaping etc.; however I don’t think that should be our focus. In fact, Google itself could mentor these topics maybe as good as we can. So please don’t just submit a proposal to us because you happen to be a Debian user, or submit it to all mentoring organizations. Instead try to find an appropriate mentoring organization. (On a side note, the mentoring organization is supposed to provide you with a mentor which can actually help you on the topic). Debian is a good choice when it comes to integrating software, software management, system administration and such. Thats what we do: collect existing software and try to make it work together as good as possible. And build infrastructure and tools to make this task easier. This of course touches e.g. porting to different architectures and writing new administration frontends, however we try to avoid reinventing the wheel.

One of the suggested topics, where I’m really surprised to not having seen a proposal yet is CRMI; which matches what I sometimes call a “per package wiki for metadata”. Or a Debtags related project. Or a SELinux project. These are both pretty interesting technologies, which offer substantial benefits when actually used. When properly integrated in the distribution.