Finishing My Gsoc Project

GSoC is near to finish, and my project its finished too. Only missing some reviews in the submit request. Its expected that it will be released in a Tumbleweed snapshot in few days. But if you don’t want to wait to try it, you can install it from the YaST Head repository. As I say in every post about the GSoC project you can see the code on Github.

One of the first things that I did after the GSoC midterm was to ask for feedback to the comunity using mailing list and forums. This was very helpful to improve the usability, for example when editing an alternative the user can set a choice with double clicking on it, and after modify an alternative doesn’t reload the whole table, only the entry for the modified alternative. Another one is that now when the user has made changes and click on cancel, a popup will appear to notify that the changes made will be lost.

Further that the feedback we decided to implement some features like a help dialog where concepts and how the alternatives works are explained to avoid confusions using the module. Also you can run the module from the YaST control center, in this way you don’t need to type a command to run the module. And a fix to crash when the user without permissions try to save changes.

But that is not all, I added tests for the user interface reaching the 100% coverage on coveralls, also I adjusted the code to the new YaST code organization and to the new version of rubocop used by the YaST team. In addition we renamed the name of the module to yast2-alternatives.

Now I will take the opportunity to talk about my experience during the GSoC with openSUSE. As it was a new project, I was able to see the whole process, since the scope of the module is determined until the submit to openSUSE Factory. During this process I learnt ruby, practiced a lot how to do test with rspec for example, I never worked with a mock or stub before, improved my knowledge about git, discovered very interesting tools like Travis, code climate and coveralls, and there are a lot of things more but I won’t write all, because it would be a large list.

This couldn’t be possible without my mentors Josef and Ancor and the daily meetings, where we discussed every day about the project status and the next steps to do. Thanks to that daily meetings, I could find the solution to the problems that were appearing also the YaST team solved any question that I asked in the irc.

Thanks to GSoC and openSUSE this has been an amazing summer. And I would really like to continue contributing to open source projects in the future and maintaning this module of YaST.