A year of Collaboration ahead

The openSUSE Project considers collaboration an important value for a Free Software community. After our successful openSUSE conference which had a strong focus on collaboration, several cool things have started. Now it is time for openSUSE bring collaboration to the Google Summer of Code and we invite students to join us in making Free Software stronger through working with others! For those who don’t know yet, Google Summer of Code is a project by Google to let students spend their summer time on coding instead of a waiting tables.

The projects

For this year, we have a number of collaborative project proposals for Google Summer of Code which are looking for an enthusiastic student who wants to get involved, learn and get some work done while getting paid for it! We present you no less than six collaborative, innovative projects for openSUSE with mentoring from the experts in their respective fields!

ICC Device Profile Repository

Color devices like printers, cameras, scanners and monitors have an ICC profile so that they work flawlessly to with color managed applications.We create an ICC Profiles, measurement targets and more meta data. Most common ICC Profiles can be determined using a vote based or ranking based system. The local clients would get a set of ICC Profiles which can be selected and installed by the user. Mentor: Kai-Uwe Behrmann

Making Libyui Distribution Independent

** Libyui is used to design our swiss knife, YaST. The power of libyui is to combine GTK, Qt and ncurses into a single code base. What is now required is to make libyui independent of openSUSE so that other distributions also can use this. Libyui has not been popular enough as it was too much coupled to YaST but it is the perfect time for us to start working on this and get a lot of fame. ** Mentor: Martin Vinder

Appstream: Add OCS support to Software Center

AppStream aims to solve the topic of how to deal with installing applications in a cross-distribution way. A core part of the Software Center story we want to build in AppStream is the social features: ratings, comments, etc. The open collaboration services (OCS) specification will be used for this. The goal of this project is to implement support for OCS in the Software Center so that, at the end of the project, social features are available. Mentor: Vincent Untz

Appstream: Make Ubuntu Software Center work on major distributions

The Ubuntu Software Center is a great piece of software to deal with applications. Unfortunately, it’s only working on Debian-based system right now. The goal of this project is to make sure the Software Center works well on major distributions, by adding a PackageKit backend and reworking the code where needed. Mentor: Vincent Untz

Upstream/downstream tracker

Many distributions have some custom tools to track upstream, and to help determine, for example, what is the latest version of an application. However, all those tools have some limitations and none is available as a service that everybody could use. The goal of this project is to bootstrap a common tracker that could be then used to know the status of a module upstream, but also in various distributions. Information about the versions, but also what patches distro use and opened bugs are the first metadata we’d want to cover. Examples:

• Debian: //dehs.alioth.debian.org/

• openSUSE: //tmp.vuntz.net/opensuse-packages/obs

Mentor: Vincent Untz

Cross Platform Bug Tracker Client

All open source projects use a bug tracker of one kind or another. The dominant software used is Bugzilla, but many projects start off on code hosting sites like GitHub or Google Code. There is no true cross platform open source desktop client for accessing these services. As a result of the recent HackWeek VI, a new client was created called Entomologist. It’s usable right now, but there are lots of areas for improvement:

• Port the application from Linux to OSX, Windows, or a mobile platform like Android. It compiles and runs on OSX, for example, but the UI doesn’t fit very well, and desktop notifications don’t work at all.

• Add more tracker support. Currently only Bugzilla is supported, with Launchpad and Google Project Hosting on the way, but there are a lot of other trackers out there (GitHub, Trac, Savane, etc)

• Improve the UI. Bug trackers have notoriously clunky UIs, so having a really user-friendly desktop UI would be very useful.

• Better integration into the desktop

• Additional features like TODO lists, private bug notes, etc.

Mentor: Andrew Wafaa and Matt Barringer

openSUSE and GSOC

As you see, openSUSE has some awesome GSOC projects, strengthening all of Free Software! If you’re not convinced yet that openSUSE and GSOC are for YOU, read Why GSOC on the wiki. Find more information on openSUSE’s GSOC this year on our GSOC 2011 wiki page. Of course we have many more ideas to choose from besides the six above, see our Ideas page!