Debian participates in the 2008 Google "Summer of Code"

------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Debian Project                                http://www.debian.org/
Debian participates in the 2008 Google Summer of Code   press <at> debian.org
April 27th, 2008                http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20080427
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Debian is participating in the 2008 Google Summer of Code

The Debian project is proud to announce that it has again been accepted
by Google as a mentor organisation for the Summer of Code programme. We
have been allocated twelve tasks for this year. Google will fund the
students mentioned here to work full time on those tasks during their
summer vacation, from May 26th to August 18th. They will be guided and
evaluated during this time by a team of Debian developers.

Several tasks cover communication between software authors, users and
Debian developers. A number of tasks target quality assurance and
improved testing, while others will result in new tools that help
maintain Debian systems.

 * Jonathan Roes will work on Netconf, a next generation approach for
   network configuration management on Linux systems. This will
   provide a single logical replacement for a large number of programs
   currently handling related tasks on Debian systems.
 * CRAN is a comprehensive archive of tools and libraries for the GNU
   R statistical computing language. Charles Blundell will write
   cran2deb, a tool to help with automatic generation of Debian
   packages from CRAN packages and bundles. This makes it much easier
   for developers and users to work with R extensions on Debian
   systems, especially for administrators of larger computing