The theory behind the partitioning proposal of yast2-storage-ng is that all possible distributions of partitions in the disk are evaluated and the best one, according to this criteria, is chosen. But I have found several examples in which is hard believe that the result is actually the optimal distribution of partitions. So I want to invest some time checking if the error is on my side and the code is indeed proposing the best solution and, if that's not the case, improving the decision making of the code.

YaST dumps quite information to its own log file (placed at /var/log/YaST2/y2log). That info is very useful to understand and discover what is happening when an issue appears. All YaST modules write into this log file, and the brand new yast2-storage-ng is not an exception. Some improvements are necessary regarding to the logging of this new module: * Libstorage-ng is the C++ library powering the rewrite of the YaST storage stack. For using libstorage-ng from yast2-storage-ng in a more Ruby-like way, we created a wrapper that provides several features like automatic downcasting. But the current downcasting mechanism used by the wrapper causes libstorage-ng to introduce a lot of noise in the YaST logs. It would be nice to reduce that noise.

We got a couple of GSoC projects around Jangouts this year: - https://code-master5.github.io/Aug-22-2017

Crystal [1] is a new language with a syntax heavily inspired by Ruby, but with statically type check and compiled! Its motto is "Fast as C, slick as Ruby", so good reason to start looking at it. I would like to play with it, check the powerful of its compiler and the C-bindings mechanism to call native libraries.

During regular L3 work I often don't find enough time to work on the command line disk partitioner parted which I maintain. Changes often directly affect yast-storage(-ng) and libstorage(-ng). @aschnell opens bugs faster than I can solve them. Upstream is often slow and often wants patches differently.

media.ccc.de currently hosts about 5TB of presentation recordings. The main mirrors send about 5TB of videos each in a single month. Several OpenSource conferences are hosted on media, like the last two openSUSE conference, or the "All Systems Go!" conference. What started as a web frontend for ftp.ccc.de in 2007 has become a complex project that integrates deeply into the tooling used by the VOC team.

Let's dust off our Amigas, hook up our mice and joysticks, and see what elegant software and hardware could do back in the 80s and 90s!