From Teaching Open Source

[edit] SBR600 Travel and Equipment

[edit] Overview

The SBR600 Software Build and Release course at Seneca teaches open source community participation to computer networking and system administration students. This semester (Fall 2010), 28 students are participating in a wide range of open source projects primarily involving the Fedora project along with various upstreams including the Mozilla project.

Through provincial grant programs, funding is available for student projects where the student project is done with an external partner and that external partner provides direction, mentorship, and technical advice (which is clearly the case in these open source projects) as well as some cash input. Thus, a small cash input from Red Hat via the POSSE Alumni program could be leveraged to provide good funding for the SBR600 student projects.

The goal of this funding will be twofold: first, it will permit a group of students to attend FUDcon Tempe in January 2011; secondly, it will enable the purchase of ARM devices and development hardware for student projects.

[edit] Projects

Students funded by this grant are working on the following projects within Fedora:

1. AutoQA - These are automated QA tools for rpm packages; the tools will be integrated with the Fedora buildsystem and activated by various events (packages being built, promotion within Koji, and so forth). This work is being done by a group of students in consultation with James Laska.

2. Fedora-ARM optimization and device support - Fedora-ARM has limited support for some of the pieces of hardware in common ARM systems (such as DSP-based video and wireless/bluetooth), and it is not optimized for the latest ARM processor families or features (armv7a, vfp, neon, thumb2). This project will enable Fedora-ARM to more fully and optimally support these devices; subprojects include benchmarking various build options to determine the best strategy for supporting the new device capabilities.

3. Mozilla/Fedora repos - Mozilla makes nightlies and developer snapshots (betas) available, and these are particularly useful to forward-thinking web devs. However, they're distributed as vanilla tarballs, which are a pain for users to keep updated and which are not configured for use with SELinux. This project aims to make the Mozilla nightlies and developer snapshots available in a Fedora-compatible repo. The builds will be the original Mozilla builds (preserving symbols and development options) packaged in a parallel-installable way with the Fedora-supplied stable Firefox release, and updates will be provided through standard tools (yum, packagekit).

[edit] Budget

We would like to apply for POSSE Alumni funding for 3 of the SBR600 projects, at $1000 each. This will enable us to receive additional grant funding of approximately $10,000, sufficient to take at least 6 students to FUDcon and purchase ARM devices and development hardware for CDOT. The exact fund usage will depend on the number of students who are able to attend FUDcon.

[edit] Results

Project results will be directly contributed into the upstream projects
Students will present their work at FUDCon Tempe in January, and meet a number of community members with whom they have been collaborating
Project work will additionally be communicated:
- Via blog postings during the projects (see Planet CDOT and, in due course, various upstream planets)
- At a poster and presentation session in April 2011 at Seneca CDOT

[edit] Status updates

Granted, $3000. Mel Chua 01:08, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
Grant approved by Connections, waiting for invoice from Seneca. Mel Chua 17:31, 13 December 2010 (UTC)