Translation(s): none
NOTE: This page is for Round 9 (December 2014 to March 2015).
The current round is Outreachy/Round10
Debian is participating in the 9th Round of the Free & Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women.
Background
Debian has been encouraging women to increase their engagement in the free software community for many years. We strongly believe this is a win-win situation for women (who open up new opportunities for themselves through community networking) and the wider free software movement (who benefit from the untapped potential of talented female developers). Statistics show that although we have increased the number of women participants, we still have plenty of room to grow. With this initiative we hope more women will see opportunities to become involved in the Debian project.
For whom
Any woman who has not previously participated in an Outreach Program for Women or Google Summer of Code and is not yet a Debian Developer nor a Debian Maintainer. This program is open to anyone who was assigned female at birth and anyone who identifies as a woman, genderqueer, genderfluid, or genderfree regardless of gender presentation or assigned sex at birth. Additionally, as a pilot for expanding the program to people from more underrepresented groups, this round is open to all participants of the Ascend Project regardless of gender. There is no age restriction and you don't need to be a student to apply.
Timeline
September 22 |
application period opens |
September 22 - October 21 |
applicants need to get in touch with at least one project and make a contribution to it |
October 22 |
application deadline at 7pm UTC |
November 12 |
accepted participants announced on https://wiki.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen/2014/DecemberMarch/ |
December 9 - March 9 |
internship period |
What to do
Choose a project
- Make a small contribution.
- Once you have chosen your project, contact its corresponding mentor and ask him/her what small contribution related to the project you could do.
- Send an application. To send your application for participating in a Debian project, you should:
use the Application Template
add your application to the OPW Applications list
email opw@debian.org with a link to your application
Please, read more about this program here: https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
Projects
We offer two kind of projects: coding projects and non-coding projects.
debsources improvements
debsources improvements: Debsources is an infrastructure and a web app to publish Debian source code on the Web. A mirror of all packages in Debian is hosted and synchronised on a dedicated server, along with all extracted packages, whose source code can be browsed with features such as syntax highlighting. Moreover, the opportunity is taken to produce statistics about all the source code in Debian. Debsources roadmap is long, and many feature requests are being accumulated. See Debsources about page for more information. The intern will work on outstanding issues, helping improve the Debsources code base and polish an important service for the Debian community.
Confirmed Mentor: StefanoZacchiroli
How to contact the mentor: info@sources.debian.net
Confirmed co-mentors: Matthieu Caneill
Deliverables of the project: any significant subset of Debsources open bugs
Desirable skills: Python programming, basic knowledge of Web development in Flask, relational databases (PostgreSQL) querying
What the intern will learn: improve Python and/or Web development skills, following the Test-Driven Development (TDD) while doing so, maintaining a large service (in terms of both data and user base) for a large Free Software community.
Improve AppArmor support in Debian
AppArmor profiles for various common applications: AppArmor is a Linux kernel security module. It helps to confine each program in a restricted environment through mandatory access control. It is not widely adopted in Debian yet, but it should be! One of the reasons is that for Debian not having sustainably adopted AppArmor is missing cross-distribution cooperation and centralized handling of profiles.
The intern will create AppArmor profiles for diverse applications and test each of them. Furthermore, she should test and adapt existing profiles and document best practices for shipping AppArmor profiles in Debian.
Improvements should be made to the Debian Bugtracking System by creating a set of usertags, and corresponding documentation, so that the AppArmor team can keep track of AppArmor-related problems archive-wide. Existing profiles should be proposed to be integrated into existing Debian packages and, when feasible, upstream.
To substantially lower the barrier for using AppArmor on Debian, and if there is time left, one could also imagine to code a tool which would make it easier to automatically activate the AppArmor LSM whenever the corresponding userspace tools are installed (702030).
Confirmed Mentor: HolgerLevsen
How to contact the mentor: holger@layer-acht.org
Confirmed co-mentors: intrigeri (intrigeri@debian.org)
Deliverables of the project:
Desirable skills:
- Good understanding of threat modeling and common security threats
- Good understanding of the Debian filesystem layout
- Good ability to learn by reading documentation
Basic programming & CLI skills
- Basic experience with Debian packaging
What the intern will learn:
Learn AppArmor profile language
- Write documentation for different audiences: Debian package maintainers, end-users
- Better understand the Debian ecosystem and cross-distro collaboration
Move forward reproducible builds
Description of the project: How can we assess than a given binary package was indeed produced by the source it claims to be coming from? By enabling independent parties to create a byte-for-byte identical packages from the same source, the ReproducibleBuilds project will enhance trust in Debian, and free software in general. Very good progress has been made over the course of the past year, but several general and particular problems remain. Some issues can be fixed at the toolchain level and will help thousands of packages at once. Others require careful examination, getting deep down the rabbit hole to understand the source of variations, and ingenuity to come up with fixes.
Confirmed Mentor: Lunar
How to contact the mentor: lunar@debian.org, Lunar^ on IRC
Confirmed co-mentors: Andrew Ayer (AGWA)
Deliverables of the project:
- Patches for many Debian packages!
- Documentation of common issues, and their solutions.
Improvements to our experimental toolchain, including strip-nondeterminism.
Improvements to the debbindiff package comparator.
Desirable skills: There's a small team and we are all learning together as we make progress. Basic understanding of Debian packages. Python for those who wants to improve debbindiff. Perl for those who wants to improve strip-nondeterminism. A thrill for investigations. A taste for fun hacks.
What the intern will learn:
- A lot about the many different ways software can be built.
- How to make build systems reproducible.
- Many details (that you might regret learning) about how our plumbing tools work.
- How to interact with other Debian developers and research suitable solutions with them.
Writing/Improving Debbugs documentation (noncoding)
Description of the project: The goal is to improve documentation of the bug tracking system so that new contributors and users of Debian can submit, find, and triage bugs. The most important goal is to provide a Bug Triager how to which will give a starting place for new bug triagers to help maintainers with many bugs. Secondary goals are to improve and provide new documentation for other parts of the BTS.
Confirmed Mentor: DonArmstrong
How to contact the mentor: don@debian.org
Confirmed co-mentors:
Deliverables of the project:
- Bug Triager howto
Improved documentation under http://www.debian.org/Bugs
- Documentation of bug-tags and categories
- Improve upstream debbugs documentation
Desirable skills: English and communication skills
What the intern will learn:
- Bug reporting workflow
- Team workflows in Debian
- webwml, git, etc.
- How to interact with other Debian teams collaboratively
Bootstrappable Debian
Description of the project: The goal is to be able to automatically bootstrap Debian for a non-existing architecture from zero without the help of another distribution that was already bootstrapped for the host architecture. Thus, the goal is to make Debian self-supporting and the first step to bootstrap Debian for a new architecture is to cross-compile a minimal native build system which can be booted on the target architecture and used to build more packages natively. Work toward this goal has been going on for several years and we now have all the necessary components into place: build profiles, multiarch, cross toolchains, botch, bootstrap.debian.net and rebootstrap.
Your task will be in connection with rebootstrap which is a continuous integration project running on jenkins.debian.net which regularly tries to cross build a minimum build system from scratch to identify the remaining problems.
Confirmed Mentor: Helmut Grohne
How to contact the mentor: helmut@subdivi.de, helmut on IRC (in #debian-bootstrap on oftc)
Confirmed co-mentors: Johannes Schauer, j.schauer@email.de, josch on IRC
Deliverables of the project:
- There are three recurring tasks:
Convert packages to Multiarch (in order to satisfy cross Build-Depends).
- Make packages cross-buildable.
- Break dependency cycles.
File bugs with Multi-Arch conversion patches for packages listed on http://bootstrap.debian.net/cross.html to make packages cross-satisfiable
- Fix cross building of coreutils, procps and probably more
Provide patches to packages affected by the libtool split.
solve the util-linux <-> systemd cycle
- reduce the transitive build dependencies of curl using build profiles
- There are three recurring tasks:
Desirable skills:
- Basic understanding of Debian packaging and how to create a patch
- Basic knowledge of how to interact with the bts to file and follow-up on bugs
- Basic understanding of cross building principles and GNU terminology
What the intern will learn: You will gain a detailed understanding cross building, Debian packaging and packaging helpers, build engineering, dependencies, multiarch, and build profiles.
TEMPLATE: Title of the project
Description of the project: At least 8-10 lines describing what the project is about; it is really important to have a good description if you want to attract applicants who are interested by the idea. This does not need to be a very technical description, but something that stirs interest and is complete enough to allow an applicant to judge whether she wants to work on the particular project or not. It does not need to be a complete road map either and does not need to explain all the tiny details and whatnot -- the mentor can tell that to interested applicants, or they can work out the exact details together.
Confirmed Mentor: Name of the mentor
How to contact the mentor: (mail, IRC, etc)
Confirmed co-mentors: It is not compulsory to have co-mentors, but it is a good idea. Secondary mentors do not need to be as knowledgeable as the first one in the project, but they should be available to help the intern if she is stuck and the main mentor is busy / not available.
Deliverables of the project:
Desirable skills: Skills that the applicant has or is willing to develop. Remember, the applicants do not have as much experience as the mentor.
What the intern will learn: At least 2-3 lines telling the applicants the skills they develop and how they will improve Debian. Do not focus on the technologies, rather use something that could motivate the prospective applicant to take your project.
Where to start
Debian is a huge project, so we have created a welcoming atmosphere:
IRC: #debian-women in the OFTC network (irc.debian.org)
Coordinators of the program:
Tom Marble <tmarble@info9.net>
Nicolas Dandrimont <olasd@crans.org>
Former coordinators:
Ana Guerrero López <ana@debian.org>
Patty Langasek <harmoney@dodds.net>
Mònica Ramírez Arceda <monica@debian.org>
Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org>
Brian Gupta <bgupta@debian.org>
Applications
See OPW Applications