.. and as you probably all know, I am going to implement cabal-configurations. (And for those who didn't know--SoC stands for Summer of Code and Google pays me for fixing your problems!) My mentor is Isaac Jones, aka. SyntaxNinja. I'll be working based on this e-mail http://www.mail-archive.com/cabal-devel@haskell.org/msg00195.html, as this is the one linked from the bug tracker. I'll also consider the previous discussions on this mailing list as some guidelines (motivation, ideas behind it, etc.). Here's a snipped of the official project timeline (http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=60325&topic=10729): .----------------------------------------------------- May 28: Students begin coding for their GSoC projects; Google begins issuing initial student payments Interim Period: Mentors give students a helping hand and guidance on their projects July 9: Students upload code to code.google.com/hosting; mentors begin mid-term evaluations July 16: Mid-term evaluation deadline; Google begins issuing mid-term student payments August 20: Students upload code to code.google.com/hosting; mentors begin final evaluations; students begin final program evaluations August 31: Final evaluation deadline; Google begins issuing student and mentoring organization payments '----------------------------------------------------- There are some minor modifications I have to / want to make. Firstly, I'll won't be able to work full time for the first two weeks as I have exams in the first and a summer course in the second. In essence, I assume that I'll work about half the time. Secondly, I plan to use darcs locally and push to some haskell.org SoC repo every day; this way I can't be blamed for loss of work if my disk crashes and you can see (and maybe even use) my latest version. Isaac also suggested that I maintain a wiki page where I post weekly progress reports. My blog is on Planet Haskell, but I'd rather not spam this with this kind of stuff. (But I will use it for announcing notable progress that might be helpful for others, or for getting attention/input on certain community-relevant design decisions.) The current schedule Isaac and I have put up looks roughly like this: Week 1: Parser & unit tests for parser - This should be relatively straightforward. I'll refrain from using Parsec, though, in order to avoid dependecies. Week 2-3: Constraint solver implementation and testing - I'll start with the naive algorithm, but I guess I need to add some more clever testing. After that, we, in principle, have cabal-configurations. But I'm afraid that's just the beginning of the real work. Week 4: Study a variety of packages and their needs, select a handful to write configurations for (I plan to ask for some suggestions a bit earlier). Write the configurations and suggest any needed improvements to syntax or capabilities (discuss on list). Post examples for everyone to look at (using IRC, wiki, and list). Week 5-8: Most likely there will come up some problems, feature request bug-reports or similar. I therefore reserve these for handling those tasks. Due to latency of communication over internet, I'll probably have some time to fill. But I guess the bug tracker will always be helpful with that. Week 9: Integration into mainline Cabal branch and work with Duncan to prepare a release candidate. (Might be scheduled earlier if things go well) Week 10-12: Analyze most important Cabal bugs and fix them, meanwhile, support release candidate. _ |_| This is obviously a rather loose schedule, so if you have any comments/critics/suggestions, feel free to post them here. Regards, / Thomas PS: Duncan / Isaac, can one of you get me that darcs + trac account? (If I don't get any response here, I'll try again in private.) -- "Remember! Everytime you say 'Web 2.0' God kills a startup!" - userfriendly.org, Jul 31, 2006