GSOC 2011: ssc - Week 1
Introduction:
My proposal for a command-line client for Suse Studio has been accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code. You can see the full proposal here. In short, the project is pretty self-evident from the title. In case you don’t know what Suse Studio is, its a web service that allows you to design custom ISOs of linux distributions. As you can imagine, designing a custom variant of a linux distro will involve a lot of configuration. This tool aims to ease the hassles involved with using the web interface to make these customisations. The most common use case for this tool as I see it will be modifying default configuration files. The tool will allow you to make all the modifications you want locally in an appliance directory and push the changes when you’re ready. If you want a more thorough view of how it will work please do read the complete proposal.
Project Details:
Now that the introduction is out of the way, some updates about my implementation of this proposal. The coding period started a couple of days back. The code is going to be hosted on gitorious, here. I’ll be pushing there almost daily and when we have a relatively stable version we’ll push to the upstream repo. The rough timeline that I hope to follow is as outlined in the proposal:
- May 24th - Jun 5th: Create the framework for the command line client. Get the option parsing working and implement some of the basic search functionality.
- Jun 6th - Jun 19th: Implement the appliance directory management features.
- Jun 20th - 26th: Release a first alpha version for testing and reviews
- Jun 27th - Jul 11th: Tidy up, refactor code. Raise test coverage. Fix Bugs.
- Jul 12th - Jul 17th: Mid-Term Review
- Jul 17th - Jul 31st: Implement the commit, update and status commands.
- Aug 1st - Aug 15th: More testing, bug fixing and community review.
High level documentation will be maintained on the openSuse wiki. Once there is substantial code, the class/method level documentation will be hosted at rdoc.info.
Work Update:
ssc uses the studio_api gem to make API calls to Studio. While trying out the gem in preparation for this project, I made a small but important(at least I think so :)) bug fix contribution to the project. It probably required someone with a crappy internet connection like mine to discover this.
So far the code written is mostly framework stuff. There’s an ArgumentParser that does the command line parsing. I’m using mocha and shoulda for testing. I decided to bump the oh-so-cool rspec/cucumber frameworks for simple test unit. I’ve used rspec in most of my projects and other than syntactical niceness I don’t see what test unit lacks. I’d like to try out that theory here.
That’s it for now I think. Not a lot, I know but hopefully, I will have more for you next time. Thanks for reading.
