Ins and Outs of Inputs

It sure is a great idea and I was always intrigued to participate. This year I finally decided to try it out. Gentoo, my distribution of choice was chosen as one of projects to mentor students. I read the ideas page and some of them seemed pretty interesting. One of them was "Tree-wide collision checking and files database". What was the idea? Basically, Gentoo is a source based distribution so noone knows what files will get installed with a certain package. This can be a problem for quality assurance team (QA). Emerge checks for file collisions before installing so you will never screw up your system, but installing some less known packages can give you a headache. Implementing this idea should help fix this situation and most probably be used for other purposes as well. One of them could be approximation of size of package to be installed. This is common in binary distributions, because they know size of package, but Gentoo has a lot of small "gotcha's" in this department. One of them is USE flags, great way to customize your distribution, but a nightmare for this sort of thing. Good thing emerge is such a great package manager :-). I will not repeat things I've said elsewhere so if you want to read more, you can read my application.

If I get accepted (I should know on April the 20th), there is a long way from where I am to making a great project for Gentoo. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up and help out a bit.