git rebase is a very useful construct in source control management, as it allows you to re-apply your changes atop a different branch of the same repository. While this concept transitions perfectly to container management (updating a container could be as easy as a docker rebase), and the Docker client is inspired by the git semantics, Docker has no such feature (in fact, Solomon Hykes used rebase and merge as examples of things "that we don't want"). Currently, zypper-docker works by applying an updated layer on top of an existing image. While this does work quite well, it separates the process of updating the base image and updating all of your derivative images (you need to re-download new packages for each derivative image). So, this project will be working on implementing something like git rebase for Docker images. There are several issues with this, mainly involving the fact that we are rebasing binaries and not source code, so merge conflicts will probably be quite messy. But it should be possible to implement some form of simple rebase method (which will essentially fall back to docker build in the worst case, which is what you were going to run anyway). By maximising the reuse of the existing image layers, it should be possible to reduce build times quite significantly.

We currently have a set of shell scripts that verify if patches can be properly installed on multiple combinations of base products, extensions and modules. These scripts are all written in shell and are annoying to maintain, as configuration and code is all mixed up. My objectives are: (a) to rewrite all the scripts in a single tool, in Python; (b) separate code and configuration, so that adding a new product/SP requires only editing a configuration file; and (c) make the checkers more flexible, allowing execution from the command line against specific repositories (use case: checking one single maintenance incident before submitting it to QAM).

• learn how to code on golang
• create a script for docker testing (bash or python)