[Debtorrent-devel] Fwd: BitTorrent Protocol Expansion (Google SoC)

[Cameron Dale]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Cameron Dale <camrdale at gmail.com>
Date: Mar 26, 2007 5:25 PM
Subject: Re: BitTorrent Protocol Expansion (Google SoC)
To: Anthony Towns <aj at azure.humbug.org.au>


Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 12:15:06AM -0700, Cameron Dale wrote:
>> With the experience you had with the project, I assume you still think it's a
>> good idea (otherwise you wouldn't have responded)?
>
> I still think it's a brilliant idea; have done since... hrm, mid 2004
> apparently. :)

Great, I've written up a proposal, and would have submitted it already
but I see they extended the deadline until tomorrow morning. You can
find the proposal here:

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~camerond/personal/GoogleSoCDebian.html

I'll have to trim a bit and split it into an abstract and description,
but I won't submit it until later tonight (say Midnight PDT), so if you
have any comments or changes you think should be made you can let me know.

> There were two problems last year -- number one was that Matthew just
> wasn't able to commit the time a GSoC project really needs, and the
> other is that the project is fairly difficult: it needs theory and
> implementation and isn't entirely straightforward. It might be that
> it's just beyond the scope of a student project.

I've tried to make the application reflect the reduced scope of the
project, in the hopes of increasing the probability of success. In
particular, I think the requirement for the BitTorrent system to notify
a user of updated packages leads to a lot of complexity early on (at
least it seemed to from the emails you sent), and is not really the
focus of the project. I've therefore moved it to an optional section at
the end.

> Sure.

Great! I'll add some info from the proposal to the Debian wiki page I
made a while back:

http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2007/BitTorrent

Nothing links to it right now, but if you want to add a link to the main
SummerOfCode2007 page that might be a good idea. I'll leave the mentor
blank for you to fill in as well.

> There were a couple of clueful-seeming people interested in helping
> last year (one submitted a proposal that didn't quite make the cut,
> another spoke up afterwards) that might be willing to chip in with ideas
> or code if asked too. If you want to go ahead with this (and there's
> a slot free!) we'll definitely want to encourage other contributions,
> and set a schedule of keeping in contact with each other and having
> regular blog posts, imo.

Hopefully they'll come forward to help. I mentioned the initial planning
of the project in the proposal a couple of times, as I think that will
be the most important part.

A contact schedule is not a problem, I have no big plans for the summer,
nor do I foresee losing Internet access. ;)

Cameron
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