The main page is at SummerOfCode2012. This page contains the available projects, all the the projects should follow the following template: (Please do not add ideas of projects, suggestions without mentors, etc, only final projects for students to take.)


Title of the project


clang support for build services

The idea of this project is to extend the Debian infrastructure to be able to build packages with clang instead of gcc/g++. clang has some advantages over gcc/g++ like better error messages and better warnings.

Even if the short/mid term goal is not to replace gcc/g++, building packages with two compilers improves the detection of C/C++ or Objective C errors, which in turn helps improve the quality of the distribution, even if the packages continue to be compiled with gcc/g++.


Provide an alternative to libstdc++ with libc++

Within the context of the LLVM project, a new implementation of the C++ standard library has been developed: http://libcxx.llvm.org/

The goal of this project is triple:

  1. Port the libc++ to Debian (GNU/Linux as a first target, maybe Kfreebsd/hurd later)
  2. Provide libc++ as a Debian package.
  3. Provide a way to switch between libstdc++ to libc++ and vice-versa

Please note that the project might be more a proof of concept and the final results might not be included into the archive.


Improving Debian Team Activity Metrics

The ''Debian Team Activity Metrics'' was started as a Google Summer of Code 2011 project by Andreas Tille (mentor), Scott Howard (co-mentor) and Sukhbir Singh (student) to measure the performance of teams in the Debian community by inspecting postings on relevant mailing lists, commit statistics from project repositories and package upload records from the Ultimate Debian Database.

Though we have developed tools that fetch the required data for the metrics described above, there is no interface to access that information. Your job will be to:

Also, if time permits, there are other improvements to be made that will make the project complete, such as implementing new metrics, verifying the veracity of existing tools and optimizing the code.

A sample of our work (external links to imgur.com):

  1. Mailing list activity
  2. 'Team Metrics' Git repository activity

So the aim of this project is to make the above information accessible through a web interface. Note: The data is ready, you just have to create an interface and present it nicely.


Create Lintian reports frontend

The static package analysis tool, Lintian, is currently being run on all packages in Debian. It has a tool called "harness" to publish the results of its quality checks on lintian.debian.org.

Currently, "harness" is an "internal" tool to generate these reports (static HTML pages), but we believe it would be useful to Debian as well as its many derivatives to have a proper tool for generating these reports.

The project is made up of two parts: the first (shorter, introductory) part is to create a black box test suite to test the current harness tool. The second and most time consuming part is to rewrite "harness" into a proper tool that is usable without a pilot license.


Add your project here :)