What is Google Summer of Code?

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Fedora has participated in this program for many years now. It is an excellent way to introduce a new generation of engineers to the Fedora Project. This year, Fedora has been granted seven slots in the program, allowing us to bring on seven talented students to work on exciting projects for Fedora.

So what are the students working on?

I’m glad you asked that! This year, we have seven tasks shared among six Fedora communities:

Fresque

Fresque is the new Fedora review server. This project aims to provide a powerful web-application to streamline the process of putting new software packages into the Fedora collection. This summer, student Rahul Ranjan will be working to add git support to the Fresque server to keep track of changes made during the package review process. Rahul will be publishing his progress regularly on his personal blog.

Nuancier

Nuancier is a voting application used to select the supplementary (non-default) wallpapers that are shipped with each Fedora release. Parth P. Panchal will be working on enhancing this system to support high-resolution, multi-monitor wallpapers. Parth will be publishing his progress regularly on his personal blog.

Ask Fedora

Ask Fedora is a question-and-answer site dedicated to helping Fedora users aid each other in solving problems. Over the next several months, Kalpani Anuradha Welivita will be working on a complete user-experience design overhaul of the Ask Fedora site. This is an ambitious (but sorely needed!) effort and we’re all excited to see the end product. Kalpani will be publishing her progress regularly on her personal blog.

Glitter Gallery

Glitter Gallery is a social platform for collaboration around design and user-experience. This summer, Aditya Prakash will be working on a very ambitious set of UI and integration efforts, bringing together SparkleShare, Inkscape and other tools together in a single collaborative environment. Aditya will be publishing his progress regularly on his personal blog.

Cockpit

The Cockpit Project is a web-based administrative console for servers. It is used by both the Fedora Server and the Fedora Atomic Image as the primary graphical interface for those systems. This summer, we have selected students to work on two tasks within the Cockpit Project.

The first task is Cockpit integration with rolekit. Student Turner England will be spending his summer developing a user interface in Cockpit to easily and effectively deploy a FreeIPA Domain Controller onto a Fedora Server system. During this time, he will be publishing his progress regularly on his personal blog.

The second task under the Cockpit Project is to add support for managing systemd timer events to the Cockpit UI. This task will be undertaken by Jakub Skořepa and you will be able to follow his progress on his personal blog (it is not yet available).

Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a fully-featured email client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Regrettably, this year the Mozilla Foundation was not itself selected as a participant in the Google Summer of Code. However, thanks to our long-standing relationship, the Fedora Project has selected to provide one of our Google Summer of Code participation slots to them to support this mutually-beneficial email client. Suyash Agarwal will be spending his summer vacation working with the Fedora Project under the tutelage of R Kent James, a long-time Mozilla contributor. His efforts this year will be to enhance Mozilla Thunderbird to support the JMAP protocol for synchronizing the client with a mail server. Throughout the summer, Suyash will be blogging regularly.

Final Thoughts

Let’s give a warm welcome to these new members of our community! It will be exciting to see their hard work in production in the autumn.