Welcome to this week's edition of "Last Week in Drizzle".  As an introduction this week I would like to quote John David Duncan's recent Facebook post: "And what's in the weather forecast for next week? Drizzle.".  Yes, our first GA release is due next week, does that mean the development pace has slowed?  Heck no!  Over 150,000 lines of bzr diff in the trunk since last week and quite a few branches still in the merge queue going through our extensive regression testing system.
Google Summer of Code
We have once again applied to be part of the Google Summer of Code program.  We had some great students last year and some new faces interested in being students on projects for Drizzle have already started taking on some low-hanging-fruit tasks to get them used to our code and processes.  We will have a sign-up form up soon so that anyone interested in being part of the program which I will blog about when …

Another of GSoC ideas that I volunteered to mentor for our GSoC was adding support for BitBake to the openSUSE Build Service. In this post I want to talk about why do I think that BitBake support for openSUSE Build Service will be useful and why do I think that OpenEmbedded is actually pretty cool.

What is BitBake? Why is OpenEmbedded cool?

BitBake is a build system used mainly by OpenEmbedded. In a way it is kind of similar to what openSUSE does for us. It takes one sources and makes it possible to build them for many distributions. There are some differences though. Let’s start with few notes a out OpenEmbedded. BitBake description will make more sense once you’ll know what OpenEmbedded …

Last week I started introducing my GSoC ideas. This is continuation of that post series. Today I’ll be writing about OpenID provider plugin for Elgg, what is it good for and why we need it.

What is Elgg and why should you care?

Elgg is a soacial networking platform. It is written in PHP and it has quite general design. It supports plugins that can change nearly anything. It also has quite vivid community around. Community that among other things provides lots of plugins. And it is of course open source. All these features were reasons why we chose Elgg as a platform for openSUSE Connect.
If you are not familiar with openSUSE …

You must already heard about this from everybody. Google Summer of Code 2011 is nearby and openSUSE wants to participate. Currently we are collecting ideas and mentors and we are going to apply. I also came up with few projects and volunteered to mentor them. I saw Thomas Thym introducing his GSoC ideas and I think it’s great to write a blog posts that introduce projects. So I’ll join and here comes the first project that many of you were waiting for – SaX 3.

SaX 3

I guess I don’t have to explain what was SaX 2 good for. It is one of the most voted features in openFATE – bring SaX back to live. SaX 2 was the tool to configure X server. Whenever your X didn’t behave correctly, whenever you needed to tweak any settings, SaX 2 was there for you. Unfortunately it worked only with xorg.conf file. …

We had 12 projects, and by the time we’ve hit mid-terms, we’ve decided to cull 2 project so far, leaving us with 10 projects.

This year, the MySQL project can really divide itself into three groups – those hacking on MySQL, Drizzle, or phpMyAdmin. Next year, will we see others? I certainly hope so…

Drizzle – Padraig O’Sullivan is doing an excellent job at working on a new implementation of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. Nathan Williams is doing great work at code cleanup for Drizzle, and making it conform to C++ standards. Jiangfeng Peng is hacking on batch nested loop join’s in Drizzle.

phpMyAdmin – Derek Schaefer is adding import improvements to phpMyAdmin, while Tomas Srnka is working on adding MySQL Replication support for phpMyAdmin (and impressing his mentor!). Zahra Naeem is working on change tracking of data/structures, and you’d expect some more work after the mid-term, once some problems are worked …

You know, amongst all the announcements this week, I should also mention that MySQL has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2009, and all our students are ready to rock and roll. Its the community bonding period now, and we have a bunch more mentors that will participate, its very exciting. Check out the student list for MySQL. Yes, lots of phpMyAdmin and Drizzle stuff too. They’re all part of the extended community, no?

…

The time is just running and it's already time, again, for students to apply for this year's Google Summer of Code program. PHP and MySQL are among the list of 150 participating organizations. So if you're a student and are interested to learn how OpenSource works, do some networking with some famous people or just want a Google T-Shirt it's your time to take a look at the different idea pages (PHP, MySQL, others) or come up with an own idea and apply. Oh if accepted you even can earn some money as part of the program ...

MySQL is participating in Google Summer of Code 2009 (GSoC for short), and so is the MySQL documentation team. We've just put our ideas on this page; you might want to have a look if you're interested in applying for a GSoc project.

One of the projects is purely technical and doesn't involve writing any documentation, but rather improving the technique that goes on behind the scenery.

The other project does involve writing documentation, but it's mostly (if not exclusively) about creating examples for the Connectors & APIs chapter of the MySQL Reference Manual, so you don't have to be a Pulitzer award winner to contribute, but you should …

As Colin revealed last week, Google has accepted MySQL for the Google Summer of Code 2009.

We’ve already participated in GSoC 2007 and 2008, so this is our third year running. We know more than before about what’s waiting for us, and so does our mentors and perhaps even some of our students. And in particular, Colin Charles has been our GSoC program coordinator all of these years, so he is quite seasoned by now.

The basic idea for MySQL to participate in Google Summer of Code is to provide students with an opportunity to …

I was a little worried last week with regards to our Google Summer of Code status, but I’m glad to see that MySQL has been accepted, for a third year running, for the Google Summer of Code 2009.

Mentors & students alike, check out the ideas page. You as a student can even submit ideas, and we’ll look for a mentor for you, naturally.

Things we’re looking for:

• Simple bug fixes
• Improvements in documentation of code
• Test suite improvements
• New features, but simple enough to implement in timeframe
…