GSoC 2021 Final Work Products

10 minutes to read

As this year’s GSoC has come and gone, it is time to compile a retrospective of all the work I have done for my GSoC project. In a nutshell, the bulk of my project was executed as I had planned in my original project proposal; some additional deliverables and enhancements not outlined in the original plan were made, while a few planned and relatively trivial deliverables were cut due to time constraints.

java-ebuilder

java-ebuilder is the tool maintained and used by the Gentoo Java team to create ebuilds for Java packages available on Maven Central, and I have used it very often in my GSoC project too. To improve the quality of java-ebuilder, I made some improvements that would be helpful to both its developers and its users to it.

System Testing Framework and Test Suite

Automated and systematic testing can help improve software quality. With a canonical, specific and well-defined test suite that can be triggered easily, developers are more likely to run tests often. Regression testing, which assists developers to capture bugs introduced by changes to the source code, also needs a test suite as its foundation. For these reasons, I wrote a system testing framework for java-ebuilder in Bash and added some test cases to verify the correctness of the entire program. The testing framework also allowed me to apply test-driven development when I was implementing new features of java-ebuilder.

Multi-line MAVEN_PROVIDES Definition

On rare occasions, an ebuild may provide more than one Maven artifact if it builds multiple JARs or is associated with a virtual artifact on Maven Central. Such an ebuild can define a MAVEN_PROVIDES variable, which is picked up by java-ebuilder for obtaining the list of all Maven artifacts provided by the ebuild. But, java-ebuilder had not been able to recognize MAVEN_PROVIDES values that span across multiple lines. This java-ebuilder improvement enables ebuilds to define the value of MAVEN_PROVIDES in more than one line, like this:

MAVEN_PROVIDES="
    org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib:1.5.21
    org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-common:1.5.21
"

Utilization of ebuild Metadata Cache

In addition to Maven artifacts provided by an ebuild, java-ebuilder also fetches other information from the ebuild, like its SLOT variable’s value. However, SLOT can be defined using not only a string but also an expression, which means that all of these SLOT definitions are valid:

SLOT="1.5" # Plain string literal
SLOT="${PV%.*}" # Bash string manipulation
SLOT="$(ver_cut 1-2)" # Version manipulation function for ebuilds

This would make it hard for java-ebuilder to get the evaluated value of the SLOT variable. The original implementation of SLOT value reading in java-ebuilder had failed to cover every possible variant of SLOT definition for this reason. Thankfully, fordfrog, a Gentoo Java team guru and the initial author of java-ebuilder, suggested reading the evaluated value of SLOT from ebuild metadata cache created by egencache. fordfrog offered the idea, and I wrote the code for this enhancement. In the end, java-ebuilder can use ebuild metadata cache as a reliable means to get the actual final value of ebuilds’ SLOT values.

Kotlin on Gentoo

The new Kotlin ecosystem on Gentoo is the part of the project I am most proud of. The packages and utilities involved comply with existing Gentoo standards and conventions to the greatest possible extent, and if they can become a part of Gentoo officially, then Gentoo will be the first GNU/Linux distribution that ships Kotlin to its users.

Kotlin Core Library ebuilds That Support Building from Source

As introduced in the related blog post, there had not been any plan to make those ebuilds at all initially because I had not believed that it would be possible to create them. The feasibility was discovered by chance. Benda, my mentor, said that the fact that packages using Gradle – like the Kotlin core libraries – can be built from source within Portage on Gentoo without invoking Gradle has very significant implications: in the near future, we might be able to ship many other packages that are supposed to be built with Gradle, including Android-related packages, to Gentoo users.

Kotlin eselect Module

  • Status:
    • Initial release published
    • ebuilds added to the Spark overlay
    • Awaiting review for official Gentoo adoption
  • Location: GitHub repository

This is an eselect module that allows users to choose a default Kotlin compiler to use when multiple compiler packages are installed on the system. For many programming languages available on Gentoo, multiple versions are provided, and the users have the ability to choose a default version to use when no version is explicitly specified. To follow this convention and offer a better user experience, the Kotlin eselect module was created to allow users to install multiple Kotlin versions at once and manage them easily.

Other Kotlin Library ebuilds

After creating the new Kotlin core library ebuilds that can be built from source, I retrofitted existing ebuilds for Kotlin packages in the Spark overlay, like OkHttp and Okio, to let them depend on those new core library ebuilds. To facilitate ebuild writing, a kotlin.eclass was added to the Spark overlay to allow consumer ebuilds of the Kotlin compiler to invoke kotlinc easily. This eclass can also be used by any new ebuilds that need to use the Kotlin compiler, which will help the Kotlin ecosystem on Gentoo to expand quickly in the future.

Package Testing Solution for the Spark Overlay

Similar to programs themselves, the packages for programs should be tested thoroughly too. Even if a program is perfect and bug-free, a problematic package for the program provided by distributors that cannot properly install the program on users’ systems would still prevent the users from running the program smoothly. For the Spark overlay, there is another important purpose of regular package testing: to detect changes to the official Gentoo software repository that render packages in the Spark overlay not installable, like removal of dependencies for example.

In the bulk of the second half of my GSoC project, I worked on various parts that constitute an automated testing solution which checks packages in the Spark overlay once a day to detect any issues blocking them from being installed. My previous blog post has already depicted the high-level design and major components of the testing solution, so I will not repeat too many details here.

ebuild-commander

ebuild-commander is a simple utility that facilitates ebuild testing in Docker containers. It allows users to run any shell command for testing ebuilds, hence the name “ebuild-commander”. More details about ebuild-commander can be found in my previous blog post, which is linked above.

Gentoo stage3 Docker Image with Java

This is something I rarely mentioned before because it is too trivial; I did not even hesitate to put it into the public domain by applying the CC0 license to it. It is merely a Docker image based on the gentoo/stage3 image with a JDK and some testing utilities for Java packages pre-installed. Its purpose is to save the runtime of the tests for the Spark overlay.

H2O on Gentoo

The H2O machine learning platform is mentioned in the original project idea description written by Benda and in the title of my weekly report emails that I arbitrarily determined when I was writing the report for the first week, so when I had only one week that I could work full-time on GSoC left but still had three planned deliverables to create, I chose to work on H2O first. Similar to Kotlin, H2O also uses Gradle as the build system; fortunately, it does not use any fancy Gradle plugin that would prevent me from successfully compiling the sources with just javac in Portage, and as a result, all H2O ebuilds I created can be compiled from source.

The H2O components created by me include the Target Encoder plugin, the H2O Flow web interface, and the H2O Python module. Due to time constraints, some extra vital components, such as the XGBoost plugin, are yet to be created. However, the existing components should be able to support an H2O installation with basic functionalities.

Fixes for Existing ebuilds in the Spark Overlay

Due to updates and removals of packages in the Gentoo repository, dependencies of many ebuilds in the Spark overlay had been broken. To bring the packages in the Spark overlay back to a working state, I fixed the broken dependencies by either migrating them to newer versions of updated dependencies or adding removed dependencies back to the Spark overlay.

Some existing ebuilds in the Spark overlay had been conditionally installable: they had not been buildable from source due to compiler errors, but users could have manually enabled the binary USE flag for them to install the pre-built JARs available on Maven Central. For those packages, I first tried to fix the compiler errors; if fixing those errors was beyond my ken, then I would enable the binary USE flag for the ebuild by default, so users would not need to enable it themselves. The final result is that every package in the Spark overlay can be installed without any errors with the default package manager configuration. The automated daily tests for the Spark overlay will continuously verify this and emit a notification when new issue emerges.

Cuts

Kotlin for Apache Spark

Because the Kotlin core library ebuilds that can be built from source were not in the original project proposal and took me some time to create and polish, I fell behind the planned time schedule for about one week and therefore decided to skip some deliverables in the final part of my project that were relatively less important and seemed harder to create. Kotlin for Apache Spark was one of the dropped deliverables. Although this would really be a nice addition to the existing Spark packages in the Spark overlay, my GSoC project’s focus is more on the new H2O packages than the existing Spark ecosystem in the overlay. Furthermore, Kotlin for Apache Spark contained some Scala code, which I thought would be difficult to compile without errors within Portage because I failed to make any existing package that used Scala in the Spark overlay buildable from source. Thus, I cut this deliverable to ensure sufficient time for other more important deliverables.

Sparkling Water

Sparkling Water helps users integrate Spark with H2O. Because in my original project proposal, the Spark overlay would contain packages for both Spark and H2O at the end of the project, I had included a plan to add ebuilds for Sparkling Water to the Spark overlay in the proposal too. Sparkling Water also uses Scala, which later led me to consider the possibility of successful creation of Sparkling Water ebuilds that can be built from source to be very low. So, I abandoned the plan on Sparkling Water and added the Python module for H2O instead as the substitute.

Acknowledgements and Conclusion

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to express again my gratitude towards Benda and fordfrog for their assistance, encouragement and understanding throughout the project. I am also grateful to Zongyu, who had started the Spark overlay in last year’s GSoC and set up a robust foundation of an ebuild repository full of Java packages for Gentoo.

I am thankful for having such a unique opportunity to help improve Gentoo with clear objectives and plans in mind, in a very systematic manner, and by working full-time on my GSoC project. Otherwise, I might have been still a wannabe Gentoo contributor who submits no more than some small patches. Because I will get busy with other non-Gentoo things soon, I expect a transition from a full-time Gentoo sub-developer back to an occasional contributor again in the following months, but I am glad to keep maintaining the Spark overlay whenever time permits. When I get plenty of free time, I might work on the things I did not have time to implement during GSoC too. Or, perhaps it might be better for me to leave them to the next person who wants to continue improving the Spark overlay in future GSoC activities, so Benda can still have project ideas for the next year. If you happen to be that person and you are reading this, please feel free to contact me! I am more than happy to help.