DebGraph
Mentor: ?RobertLemmen
Summary: Software to analyse the dependency graph between debian packages
Required skills: C++, working with people, ?CompilerConstruction with Flex/Bison would be cool
Description: Debian already has great tools to make sure individual packages are up to standard (lintian, linda), but with the number of packages, architectures etc growing the complexity in the dependency graph will become an increasing problem. There are already many small tools and scripts that look at certain aspects of these dependencies (e.g. debcheck, although that is not so "small"). Implementing such a script for a new pupose means a lot of repetition work (parsing the files in question, building the graph etc), and is not nceessarily trivial. Therefore a generic infrastructure to implement tests on the dependency graph would be quite cool. I already have quite a bit of foundation code (therefore the requirement to write in C++), so the student would not need to start from scratch.