There is the summary about my work in Google Summer of Code during the last three months.

About Me

I’m Mandy (Mengying) Wang, I studied in Shanghai Institute of Technology major in Software Engineering, and I graduated two months ago. I’m going to study for a master’s degree after a gap year. You can learn more about me in my Twitter: @MandyMY_ .

Task

Plinth is a web interface to administer the functions of the FreedomBox which is a Debian based project, and the main goal of this idea is to make it available for Fedora.

My Work

Finished

  • Modifying the source code module by module to convert it to RPM-based, including replacing the apt command code with the dnf command code or fit both of them, changing the Deb-based packages into RPM-based packages which play the same roles and testing after each module finished.
  • Add the guide of RPM-based package to Plinth User Guide and create a wiki page for it in Fedora.

This is the welcome page which is run in Fedora:

welcome

To Do

  • Some packages which is needed by Plinth, but I can’t find their suitable replacement or effective solution in Fedora, except copying them from Debian directly. For example:
    • Javascript — many pages can’t be loaded perfectly because of that.
    • LDAP — we can’t complete set up because of that.
  • Make a RPM package for Plinth from source and setup a repo for it in Copr.

Links

Experience

As why Fedora, just because Fedora is the Linux distribution I use the most, so I want to know more about it and make contributions to it, and I believe GSOC is a good chance to integrate into a community, because I had the similar experience in GNOME during Outreachy. And when I went to Taipei for the COSCUP 2017 in early August, I joined the offline meeting of Fedora Taiwan and advertised GSoC to others.

I must say the last three months in GSoC was a quite valuable experience for me. This idea is not easy as I thought, I learned more about the difference between .rpm and .deb during this period, and my VPN was blocked in the second phase. Fortunately, I dealt most problems I met under my try and my mentor’s guide.

At last, thanks to Google and Fedora for giving me this opportunity, and thanks to my mentor, our admin and the people from Fedora and Debian who had given me help.

 


This work by Mandy Wang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International