Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On 12/17/2012 10:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: Hi everyone, Give the talk on the list about attracting devs, I've should probably mention that I'm teaching a College Course on Gentoo Development next semester. I know two students will most likely go through the recruitment process, others may at least contribute. So its like GSoC but the focus is not one project but an overview of general gentoo development, and I will have to touch on lots of stuff outside of gentoo per se, like how autotools and other build systems work. So what should I teach? Here's what I've got off the top of my head: 1. Open source communities and Gentoo's internal political structure. 2. Building a gentoo system, ie the handbook. Gentoo as metadistribution. 3. Delivering the goods: code - build system - portage - compiled goodies - working system 4. How to work with gnu autotools. Writing a build system. 5. How to write ebuilds, ie the dev manual. How to work with cvs and git. 6. Arches, arch testing. Profiles. 7. Building stages. Catalyst. Somewhere in there I'll squeeze in Gentoo's alt factor: alternative c libs, alternative compilers and hardening, alternative kernels, prefixes. Please comment. If it gets systematized enough, it can be a guide to future devs too. Everything will be creative commons. You might want to have a lecture about software licensing. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On 12/17/2012 07:46 PM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: 2. Write an ebuild for the project above, maintained in an overlay (also on GitHub), with sources fetched from GitHub. Add some small patch to configure.ac in the ebuild. Add USE flags. Add make check support to the build system, test with FEATURES=test. Many ebuild-related tasks can be easily added (e.g. installing init.d scripts). This would be totally new to them but I agree that's a good idea. I don't know about GitHub. Can you delete projects from it when you're done because I don't want to polute GitHub with lots of unpolished stuff. You can. 3. Take an old-version ebuild for a project with a known bug, fetch the relevant git tag, and bisect to find the bug. Prepare a patch, describe patch submission process. Hmm ... I didn't think of this but I could do that with the kernel on virtual machines. You might want a userland program to avoid having to do reboots. I suppose git itself could be a good candidate for this. Wrt. subjects covered, will you cover sandboxing, installing to image vs. merging to live system, etc.? I would expect students to like such stuff. At some point I would have to cover that. Like when I got over the phases of emerging, stepping through them with ebuild. You make me wish that this class was available when I was doing my undergraduate degree. I had to learn this on my own. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 12/17/2012 10:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: Hi everyone, Give the talk on the list about attracting devs, I've should probably mention that I'm teaching a College Course on Gentoo Development next semester. I know two students will most likely go through the recruitment process, others may at least contribute. So its like GSoC but the focus is not one project but an overview of general gentoo development, and I will have to touch on lots of stuff outside of gentoo per se, like how autotools and other build systems work. So what should I teach? Here's what I've got off the top of my head: 1. Open source communities and Gentoo's internal political structure. 2. Building a gentoo system, ie the handbook. Gentoo as metadistribution. 3. Delivering the goods: code - build system - portage - compiled goodies - working system 4. How to work with gnu autotools. Writing a build system. 5. How to write ebuilds, ie the dev manual. How to work with cvs and git. 6. Arches, arch testing. Profiles. 7. Building stages. Catalyst. Somewhere in there I'll squeeze in Gentoo's alt factor: alternative c libs, alternative compilers and hardening, alternative kernels, prefixes. Please comment. If it gets systematized enough, it can be a guide to future devs too. Everything will be creative commons. Can I take this course online? Will the lectures be recorded? - -ZC -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJQz0IQAAoJEKXdFCfdEflKikMP/iXGzyM1Bda1hfWa8L9Iby8e kpRee1N/7+QpjZB/caDVzNm5CWEJn3Vs2LP71Ig/Ybve41EvqGJXGfBDAbF7cfIb d6kXZqgPfKj480TT2toUAY/fIji3jbmrPxrTYBXigDsIcUxrpiMykgQMifW4esK/ 1ZddA5UCI8LQxIjrDDItVQL88PMz7vSBQqgJvobXAPEdHG/xDXLUews4UsgN6z7c F95220G2DmaPzxnITIuJfFQ1sui1ahkHJRLr4uz1e8BMFcnCbWJOFsQAqNvX8YZV iAcb4HHTC6EXD5MUKF+OGv+sy1PJy8f4G7/cnERJxdADdyZkOUj8HQGEnuY3znt+ nbvSoCQVGAEkdm0mQY6x7kbZDzQhvztvrP2ovMCLz9FPzai+wcWQ07d00nbQd17v mUPntVXSYKsXKg+hTPj1rGzh3Nu9zGcw7mwtJwH/z0J3sqPJRSlp88KCWIOP7bro J+7trObO8c9GYQK6JVAFL7sxBQct9vBO4DETOJ6XxMG7lJ89GLA/zdSIBWbvWPZf GZ+Z3+ohV//Bf9I28S5AeRVczBdAE13EFUj7VcvsRYTMkTgawHo3jQtU+gzRHfhk H/16vCDoZ511F4wu4PF9zKWuffiVy25y0PLPewbwlPbvPwAIWiK4hsGt87t2mckr cerDzNSNBYf9NfbHiMe7 =7Vnh -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On 12/17/12 7:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: So what should I teach? Here's what I've got off the top of my head: Please comment. If it gets systematized enough, it can be a guide to future devs too. Everything will be creative commons. I think it's worth to mention somewhere that although packages take longer to compile than downloading binaries, people don't have to _watch_ the compilation, and many things can be done e.g. overnight. Also, remember that Google's ChromeOS takes a lot of things from Gentoo, including the package manager and many ebuilds. The idea here is that it has applications in the industry. Oh, unbundling libraries _might_ be valuable too. Or automagic dependencies and other such packaging issues. Paweł signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On 17/12/12 10:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: Hi everyone, Give the talk on the list about attracting devs, I've should probably mention that I'm teaching a College Course on Gentoo Development next semester. I know two students will most likely go through the recruitment process, others may at least contribute. So its like GSoC but the focus is not one project but an overview of general gentoo development, and I will have to touch on lots of stuff outside of gentoo per se, like how autotools and other build systems work. So what should I teach? Here's what I've got off the top of my head: 1. Open source communities and Gentoo's internal political structure. 2. Building a gentoo system, ie the handbook. Gentoo as metadistribution. 3. Delivering the goods: code - build system - portage - compiled goodies - working system 4. How to work with gnu autotools. Writing a build system. 5. How to write ebuilds, ie the dev manual. How to work with cvs and git. 5.5: BUGS Very appropriate here to include somewhere (perhaps as a precursor to #4 or as part of #5) how to (A) generate useful patches, (B) apply patches for testing (overlay ebuild, epatch_user, etc), (C) use bugzilla (useful submissions, bug-wrangling, herds). QA related issues would be good to deal with, also (maybe under arch testing in #6?). IE: missing dependencies, automagic dependencies, --as-needed failures, etc. etc. 6. Arches, arch testing. Profiles. 7. Building stages. Catalyst. Somewhere in there I'll squeeze in Gentoo's alt factor: alternative c libs, alternative compilers and hardening, alternative kernels, prefixes. Please comment. If it gets systematized enough, it can be a guide to future devs too. Everything will be creative commons. The exam isn't going to be the ebuild quiz, is it? :) -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlDPVP0ACgkQ2ugaI38ACPBxNQD/RvBkMHaJiwds7HpLUXnocWUi cKXoBLfTMzeWPuVaV7QA/A3tWYw7FSTK6TCMEI68c3INcrFEF5jqjKlXha7rzq0s =igjU -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On 12/17/2012 12:23 PM, Ian Stakenvicius wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On 17/12/12 10:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: Hi everyone, 5. How to write ebuilds, ie the dev manual. How to work with cvs and git. 5.5: BUGS Very appropriate here to include somewhere (perhaps as a precursor to #4 or as part of #5) how to (A) generate useful patches, (B) apply patches for testing (overlay ebuild, epatch_user, etc), (C) use bugzilla (useful submissions, bug-wrangling, herds). QA related issues would be good to deal with, also (maybe under arch testing in #6?). IE: missing dependencies, automagic dependencies, --as-needed failures, etc. etc. Yes! Definitely. -- Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D. Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened] E-Mail: bluen...@gentoo.org GnuPG FP : 8040 5A4D 8709 21B1 1A88 33CE 979C AF40 D045 5535 GnuPG ID : D0455535
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On 2012.12.17 16:02, Rick Zero_Chaos Farina wrote: On 12/17/2012 10:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: Hi everyone, Give the talk on the list about attracting devs, I've should probably mention that I'm teaching a College Course on Gentoo Development [snip] Can I take this course online? Will the lectures be recorded? -ZC I would be interested in an online version too. -- Regards, Roy Bamford (Neddyseagoon) a member of elections gentoo-ops forum-mods trustees pgpNo4gexStsn.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Anthony G. Basile bluen...@gentoo.org wrote: Please comment. If it gets systematized enough, it can be a guide to future devs too. Hi, what is the level of the students, what are the prerequisites (i.e., have they already seen some systems programming using C?), and how many weekly hours? Have you already designed some assignments? I can think of the following: 1. Create a small makefile-based project with a separate shared library, an executable, and a man page. Determine run-time and build-time dependencies. Then convert to autotools, update dependencies. Do it all on GitHub, with a separate branch for converting to autotools. 2. Write an ebuild for the project above, maintained in an overlay (also on GitHub), with sources fetched from GitHub. Add some small patch to configure.ac in the ebuild. Add USE flags. Add make check support to the build system, test with FEATURES=test. Many ebuild-related tasks can be easily added (e.g. installing init.d scripts). 3. Take an old-version ebuild for a project with a known bug, fetch the relevant git tag, and bisect to find the bug. Prepare a patch, describe patch submission process. Wrt. subjects covered, will you cover sandboxing, installing to image vs. merging to live system, etc.? I would expect students to like such stuff. -- Maxim Kammerer Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 1:09 PM, Roy Bamford neddyseag...@gentoo.org wrote: On 2012.12.17 16:02, Rick Zero_Chaos Farina wrote: On 12/17/2012 10:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: Hi everyone, Give the talk on the list about attracting devs, I've should probably mention that I'm teaching a College Course on Gentoo Development [snip] Can I take this course online? Will the lectures be recorded? -ZC I would be interested in an online version too. As would I. (I'd also be very interested in seeing the structure duplicated to produce similar material for other common distributions...but I'm a chrestomathy addict.) -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
4. How to work with gnu autotools. Writing a build system. Writing a build system from scratch is actually not a requirement. However one should understand basics of the most popular build systems and probably have some advanced understaning of Makefiles and how flags work, where they should be placed and so on which leads me to what you'v been missing a bit: QA Why we do it and what the most common QA issues are (things like disrespected CFLAGS/CC/LDFLAGS, bundled libs, broken parallel make, portage QA notices (i.e. broken strict-aliasing), automagic dependencies and so on). That's what seperates us from many other distros. 5. How to write ebuilds, ie the dev manual. How to work with cvs and git. a few more specific thoughts on this... IMO one of the more important points of writing ebuilds is to figure out the dependencies correctly and how to implement use flags properly. So figuring out dependencies usually involves reading the build system and might even involve grepping/reading source files for includes/dlopen or language specific things (note the differences in ruby, perl and python...), cause assuming that the information from upstreams INSTALL/README file suffices is almost always wrong. Regarding useflags it's important to a) decide whether it makes sense to offer that useflag/choice at all, b) what name to choose, so we don't confuse the user, c) give descriptions in metadata.xml if the usecase differs from the global description and d) test them all (which leads us to point 6) And that's exactly how I usually begin writing an ebuild: - figure out all dependencies - figure out what useflags to provide and how to implement them - fix QA issues/patch the build system Then the next thing is just understanding phase functions and the regular helpers like econf/cmake-utils.eclass/eutils.eclass which you can read up quite easily. I would probably leave a few things behind like java ebuilds, ruby ebuilds or even python ebuilds (due to the current eclass conversion/confusion) and focus on autotools, cmake and plain Makefile related things. Give a few good and bad examples for each of them, so people understand that every build system can be messed up.
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On 12/17/2012 07:11 PM, Maxim Kammerer wrote: Then convert to autotools, update dependencies. Do it all on GitHub, with a separate branch for converting to autotools. That's not really a common thing to do for ebuild development (neither converting nor writing from scratch). Actually you only do that if you have direct access to the upstream repo or know that they will accept your patch. That happened only once to me.
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:32:03 -0500 Anthony G. Basile bluen...@gentoo.org wrote: 5. How to write ebuilds, ie the dev manual. How to work with cvs and git. An important thing to teach here is how to code to a spec vs how to code to an implementation. It's also something people should know in general... -- Ciaran McCreesh signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:02:24AM -0500, Rick Zero_Chaos Farina wrote: SNIP Can I take this course online? Will the lectures be recorded? I would second the idea of an online course if that is possible: I would even gladly do the beta testing of such an online course... ;) WKR Hinnerk
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 8:18 PM, hasufell hasuf...@gentoo.org wrote: On 12/17/2012 07:11 PM, Maxim Kammerer wrote: Then convert to autotools, update dependencies. Do it all on GitHub, with a separate branch for converting to autotools. That's not really a common thing to do for ebuild development (neither converting nor writing from scratch). These are proposed course assignments (supposed to cover understanding of certain subjects), not a training for writing ebuilds. :) -- Maxim Kammerer Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On 12/17/2012 10:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: Hi everyone, Give the talk on the list about attracting devs, I've should probably mention that I'm teaching a College Course on Gentoo Development next semester. I know two students will most likely go through the recruitment process, others may at least contribute. So its like GSoC but the focus is not one project but an overview of general gentoo development, and I will have to touch on lots of stuff outside of gentoo per se, like how autotools and other build systems work. This is a great idea, and is essentially the pay someone to recruit approach taken to an extreme. I would be willing to pay for a class like this (online or otherwise) if it meant that there were a clear set of goals, which if met, meant that I'd become a developer. Why can't something like this *be* the recruiting process? Put up a syllabus. The wait to be noticed process is so vague as to be useless.
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
Am 17.12.2012 17:02, schrieb Rick Zero_Chaos Farina: On 12/17/2012 10:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote: Hi everyone, Give the talk on the list about attracting devs, I've should probably mention that I'm teaching a College Course on Gentoo Development next semester. I know two students will most likely go through the recruitment process, others may at least contribute. So its like GSoC but the focus is not one project but an overview of general gentoo development, and I will have to touch on lots of stuff outside of gentoo per se, like how autotools and other build systems work. So what should I teach? Here's what I've got off the top of my head: 1. Open source communities and Gentoo's internal political structure. 2. Building a gentoo system, ie the handbook. Gentoo as metadistribution. 3. Delivering the goods: code - build system - portage - compiled goodies - working system 4. How to work with gnu autotools. Writing a build system. 5. How to write ebuilds, ie the dev manual. How to work with cvs and git. 6. Arches, arch testing. Profiles. 7. Building stages. Catalyst. Somewhere in there I'll squeeze in Gentoo's alt factor: alternative c libs, alternative compilers and hardening, alternative kernels, prefixes. Please comment. If it gets systematized enough, it can be a guide to future devs too. Everything will be creative commons. Can I take this course online? Will the lectures be recorded? -ZC I would be interested in this course as well :)
Re: [gentoo-dev] College Course in Gentoo Development
On 12/17/2012 01:11 PM, Maxim Kammerer wrote: On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Anthony G. Basilebluen...@gentoo.org wrote: Please comment. If it gets systematized enough, it can be a guide to future devs too. Hi, what is the level of the students, what are the prerequisites (i.e., have they already seen some systems programming using C?), and how many weekly hours? Have you already designed some assignments? I can think of the following: 1. Create a small makefile-based project with a separate shared library, an executable, and a man page. Determine run-time and build-time dependencies. Then convert to autotools, update dependencies. Do it all on GitHub, with a separate branch for converting to autotools. Its a second year course so they've had some programming in Java but no serious C. It meets 3 hours a week but I expect about 6 hours more per week in assignments. There is some overlap with other stuff I've taught: Makefiles, autotools, git and shared objects. I did my lecture materials in git and then ran a git rebase -i in class and redid the commits showing them what happened on each point. You can see some of that stuff here - practice with git - http://tweedledum.dyc.edu/gitweb/?p=model-git.git;a=summary how autotools works - http://tweedledum.dyc.edu/gitweb/?p=autotools.git;a=summary how Makefiles work - http://tweedledum.dyc.edu/gitweb/?p=makefile.git;a=summary how shared objects work - http://tweedledum.dyc.edu/gitweb/?p=shared-objects.git;a=summary 2. Write an ebuild for the project above, maintained in an overlay (also on GitHub), with sources fetched from GitHub. Add some small patch to configure.ac in the ebuild. Add USE flags. Add make check support to the build system, test with FEATURES=test. Many ebuild-related tasks can be easily added (e.g. installing init.d scripts). This would be totally new to them but I agree that's a good idea. I don't know about GitHub. Can you delete projects from it when you're done because I don't want to polute GitHub with lots of unpolished stuff. 3. Take an old-version ebuild for a project with a known bug, fetch the relevant git tag, and bisect to find the bug. Prepare a patch, describe patch submission process. Hmm ... I didn't think of this but I could do that with the kernel on virtual machines. Wrt. subjects covered, will you cover sandboxing, installing to image vs. merging to live system, etc.? I would expect students to like such stuff. At some point I would have to cover that. Like when I got over the phases of emerging, stepping through them with ebuild. -- Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D. Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened] E-Mail: bluen...@gentoo.org GnuPG FP : 8040 5A4D 8709 21B1 1A88 33CE 979C AF40 D045 5535 GnuPG ID : D0455535
