It is official now. Fedora will be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2011.
This summer, I am looking for mentoring one/two students who can help me with fedora-medical. It would be a nice opportunity to work on something really interesting, get paid a handsome amount of monies and build contacts within the community and industry.
If you want to know what fedora-medical is, a somehow short description for the project is on the idea page. If you want more details about fedora-medical and what we are working on, its on the wiki page.
Unlike most other tasks, this is an in-progress task, we are already working on it and that means we know exactly what we are looking for. We will be doing lots of rpm packaging and we will also be creating tools for our workflow. We are a python shop, so python skill will be required.
These are the things I shall be looking for. A few will be redundant, but worth mentioning.
* Very good skill in RPM packaging.
* Reasonable familiarity with fedora packaging guidelines.
* Good skill in python and bash.
* Familiarity with Fedora internals. (Here, I am referring to the OS).
* Familiarity with Version Control Systems (We use git for most of the tasks) .
* Familiarity with comps files, yum and fedora package management.
That sounds very easy, right?
Not really. Turns out that most of the medical software are very hard to package and most of them have recursive dependencies that need to be packaged beforehand. It is not that they are not doable, but they need lots of work. But once done, this will be something that will be really useful for everyone. You won’t work alone, we will continue to work on this.
If everything goes as planned, at the end of the summer, we will be looking at a yum group with lots of medical software, and (maybe) a spin. 🙂
I am already getting mails from interested students and I am very happy about it. If you are interested in working with me, please drop me a mail at susmit at fedoraproject dot org.
The Diary of a Nobody 
A lot of the stuff will have been packaged by DebianMed, so you can look at Debian packages to see how they deal with upstream weirdness.