Name: Guillaume MAZOYER

Contact/Email: respawner@gmail.com | #java-gnome on irc.gimp.net

Background: I'm a 22-year-old student in computer science. I'm currently studying at the University of Franche-Comté in France and I hope to join the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard next year to become a computer science engineer (master degree). My studies brought me to achieve two internships. My first one consisted in strudying voice over IP protocols and writing a C program to extract sound and video from network packets. The topic of my second internship is the development of a web application to share files online.

I have been a big fan of Free/Libre Open Source Software since 2006 and have been using Debian and Ubuntu from that year. As a free software developer I use Java a lot. I'm one of java-gnome developers' and the creator of GNOME Split. These both projects are written in Java and I have been contributing to them since 2009.

My free software experience also includes some contributions to Debian and Ubuntu with some packaging. I have been a member of the Debian Java team since this year to increase my commitment in Debian and to help maintaining the java-gnome package.

Project title: Jigsaw (modular java) in Debian

Synopsis: Packaging modular java in Debian

Benefits to Debian: Java is a really appreciated language by many developers. Packaging Jigsaw for Debian will help improving it by testing it and proposing a brand new JVM to developers. Being one of the most used GNU/Linux distributions, Jigsaw will be available to a large community. Lots of Java developers will be able to test the modular VM and to report bugs against it. It's the best way to improve the quality and the performance of the VM.

Deliverables:

Project details: The Java Virtual Machine is a big virtual machine will all the features incorporated in it. This Virtual Machine provides many features which are useful in only limited areas (Corba) or which are not used at all in some contexts (AWT/Swing are useless for a web server). The goal of the jigsaw project is to provide a modular JVM. This will provide many improvements in the performance area (start-up, solving of the dependencies, etc) but also the size of the dependencies. There are already some works done by upstream (Oracle) but it does not complain to the Debian standards. The target is Java 8. The goal for this Google Summer of Code project is to package the current development version of Jigsaw into Debian. Besides packaging, this project will probably implies some developments and contributions to upstream (upstream is aware of this effort).

Project schedule: Familiarize with Jigsaw and its build system. Read the Debian policies about the packaging process. Start building the modules and test it to find possible bugs. Collaborate with upstream to fix bugs and commit patches (already on jigsaw-dev, debian-java mailing lists and irc channels). Write documentation and try to hack on javahelper to support packages.

Exams and other commitments: My intership ends in June (10 of the month) so I will be available only after 5:30PM (CEST) until that date.

Other plans for Debian after GSoC: I wish to be able to maintain Jigsaw in Debian and to become a Debian Maintainer as part of the Debian Java team.