Summer Of Code 2009: Working for Debian

Yesterday Google announced the students and projects that have been accepted for Google Summer Of Code 2009 and guess what: my project was accepted. This means I will be working full-time on FOSS this summer.

So I guess it's about time to introduce my project to you: Distribution-independent update manager, mentored by Michael Vogt (mvo).

Okay, I believe some of you might wonder what this project is all about, as update-manager is in the Debian package archive already. There is a problem with update-manager though. As you see in the package's version number (it contains ".debian") update-manager has been adapted for use in Debian. Also, Debian contains update-manager 0.68 right now, whilst upstream (Ubuntu in this case) has released 0.111.6 (actually there were quite a few upstream versions meanwhile). The reason Debian is nowhere near being up-to-date with upstream is that right now a lot of effort has to be put into porting update-manager to Debian every time a new upstream release is made, because certain Ubuntu-specific functionality breaks update-manager in more or less severe ways on Debian.

This leads me directly to what my project is about: making update-manager (Ubuntu-) distribution-independent, but not package manager independent.
There are 6 main goals for this project, which I will be working on in the order below.

• Analyzing the code and identifying Ubuntu-specific parts.


• Creating a distribution-plugin interface and moving the Ubuntu-specific parts into a distribution-plugin, creating a core package that is distribution-independent.


• Creating a special notification for important/security related updates and providing the code that handles updates from security.debian.org as such.


• Creating a backend-plugin interface, moving the synaptics backend into a backend-plugin and optionally create a python-apt based plugin.


• UI redesign, providing a simpler interface to average joe, whilst allowing more experienced users to optionally display more information.


• Automatic downloading & installation of updates. This is still up to discussion, as automatic downloading is already provided by software-properties (-gtk and -kde) and automatic installation can be handled by unattended-upgrades. Both packages are part of Debian already.

Please note that this list should not be considered final and may be extended or modified over time. It exists to give you an overview of what exactly my project is about and how I am planning on carrying out the tasks.

Finally I wanted to let you know that I will keep you posted on the progress I am making, via this blog. Alternatively a blog aggregator for Debian's GSoC students has been set up over at http://soc.alioth.debian.org/feeds/blogs/, where you can not only find my posts, but those of all of Debian's students.