DebNet: Visualising the Bus Factor – Graph Analysis of Debian's Infrastructure
Description of the project: Debian has more than 70.000 packages in the archives, which are all held together by a decentralised community of a few thousand volunteers. DebNet aims to visualise the resilience of the archive by modelling the archive as a graph. You will collaborate with mentors to define specific KPIs (e.g. Bus Factor, Centrality, ...) to evaluate archive health. The goal is to identify critical packages that are abandoned or rely on too few maintainers which need more support. You will build a FastAPI application to provide all analysed data through HTTP endpoints. This project offers the chance to actively shape how we detect single points of failure within the distribution.
Confirmed Mentor: Christian Kastner, Arian Ott
How to contact the mentor: Christian Kastner <ckk@debian.org>, Arian Ott <arian.ott@ieee.org>
Confirmed co-mentors: Debian AI Team <debian-ai@lists.debian.org>
Difficulty level: Hard
Project size: 350h
Deliverables of the project: FastAPI backend (which does all the analytics etc.)
Desirable skills:
- Foundational knowledge of Graph Theory
- Python programming
- Basic knowledge of SQL
What the intern will learn:
- Using Graph theory to analyse the debian archive
- Building secure and performant FastAPI applications
Application tasks: Solve the tasks from this repo: https://salsa.debian.org/Arian-Ott/debnet-application-tasks
Related projects: None (maybe UDD?)
AI usage Policy: We will not accept applications written using LLMs, and we expect accepted students to write code themselves, not via an LLM.