A little more than a week ago, I received an email saying that my Kworkflow project proposal to GSoC 2023 was accepted. For those that don’t know, I’ll take a step back and explain what is Kworkflow, the GSoC 2023 program and what exactly entails being accepted into it.
kw
The first thing is that the Kworkflow (or just kw) project, in simple terms, aims to be the best bud of the Linux kernel developer. If you ever experimented with tinkering with the Linux kernel, you may know that many repetitive (and dangerous) actions can be automated and that this “category of development” would welcome a unified ecosystem. As the project’s website states “kw has a simple mission: reduce the environment and setup overhead of developing for Linux. kw is composed of different software components unified in a single interface”. In my opinion, the project is doing this masterfully.
For the past year or so, I’ve been continuously contributing to the project, so I get that my opinion may be biased toward my community. But that is the second thing: open-source projects. kw introduced me to the notion of communities built around a software project and how this approach is (there goes another biased opinion) enormously advantageous when compared with other forms of writing collaborative software.
I invite everyone to take a look at kw’s GitHub repo and, who knows, maybe start contributing!
GSoC 2023
GSoC 2023 stands for “Google Summer of Coding 2023”. As this name suggests, it is the 2023 edition of something related to coding during the summer supported by Google. Jokes aside, it doesn’t go far from that. In my understanding, the program aims to connect open-source mentor organizations with contributors where the latter proposes projects to the former, and the accepted ones are developed during the summer (in the northern hemisphere) in 12-22 weeks. It is a great initiative (although there is nothing “initial” to it, as the first edition was in 2005) that no doubt results in tons of great experiences (and software, of course).
My project
In the context of kw’s mission, there is a missing link in the Linux kernel developer workflow that kw doesn’t cover. The Linux kernel is collaboratively developed using mailing lists. If you want to propose changes to the kernel, there comes a time when you have to send your patches in the form of emails to the mailing lists and interact with these to collect feedback, make adjustments, and so forth. If you are on the other end, i.e., you are the one reviewing the sent patches in the lists, you also have to interact with those lists. Either way, even if you are just a curious person wanting to peek into the discussions of developers from the whole world, you still have to interact with the public mailing lists.
For the sending part, kw already has a wonderful feature called kw mail that makes the whole process of converting a set of commits into patches and sending them to the right mailing list just a single command. However, for the interaction part, kw has a simple prototype feature named kw upstream-patches-ui that is a long way from being ready.
My project aims to fully develop kw upstream-patches-ui and refine it to allow a kernel developer to just rely on kw and a text editor for his/her workflow. TLDR, my goal is to integrate kw with the lore.kernel.org archives and provide a much more friendly interface with the public mailing lists. At first the UI will be terminal based using dialog. However by using the Model-View-Controller pattern, adding other UIs (like a web one) will not be so complicated.
You can check my GSoC 23 application here.
Conclusion
I’m happy for being accepted into GSoC 2023, even more, because I’ll be contributing to kw that really “feels like home”. I can’t predict the future but I truly believe that, if everything goes well, the kw project will have a marvelous addition in about 12-22 weeks.