Hi, I am a Computer Science bachelor student at Hochschule Bochum, Germany currently enrolled in my 6th semester.
My contributions to Free Software cover a wide range, to mention some of the more notable and recent works: I ported many applications to GNU Guix (500+ contributions). Since December 2016 I am the maintainer of libgnurl, a fork of cURL / libcurl used by GNUnet.
As part of the developer team around GNUnet I have been handling a broad range of tasks, mostly the build-system, updating the documentation, website work, server administration and onboarding for new people, system integration, and so forth.
I’ve been involved with NetBSD for a while, I maintain a number of packages for NetBSD's pkgsrc.
I am interested in the NetBSD pkgsrc project proposal to generate ‘.deb’ packages from pkgsrc builds (“Creating .deb Packages”).
In my last Google Summer of Code project for GNU libmicrohttpd I was asked for prior experience with the project I apply to. I’m familiar with Debian as a System Administrator and have some experience with using pkgsrc on Debian. I have read into the Debian packaging format before. My familiarity with pkgsrc has been pointed out above.
I have not applied for any other project as the application deadline is very close.
As a preparation I will refresh and extend my knowledge about both the native pkgsrc format as well as the .deb Debian package format.
I'm interested in this project for pkgsrc because statistically the ‘.deb’ package format is still relevant today and with the number of installations of running Debian-based systems out there it will remain relevant for the foreseeable future. My interests include package managers and the ability to generate .deb packages seems useful in a professional context to me and could improve the user experience on Debian.
My expectation for the outcome of this project is as follows:
I do understand more about pkgsrc internals and Debian packaging internals
pkgsrc can generate ‘deb’ packages
a range of basic packages have functional ‘.deb’ packages which can be installed on Debian
As a timeline for the Google Summer of Code project I propose the following:
Month 1:
Read into ‘.deb’ format documentation
Experiment with tools for ‘.deb’ packages
Investigate differences between pkgsrc’s pkg and deb format
Month 2:
Import necessary tools to generate ‘.deb’ packages
Write code to generate ‘.deb’ packages
Document the resulting tools
Month 3:
Build many packages and look for bugs
Fix bugs and improve the results
If time is left:
Write an ‘.deb’ to pkg converter
The progress will be communicated with the mentor(s) of this project in weekly communication.
Cheers, Nikita