Open Source in India

Following on from The Summer of Code, Google hopes to continue the momentum started by further encouraging developers around the world to contribute to open source. Zaheda Bhorat speaks this month about The Summer of Code at the following conferences:

• GNUnify in Pune, Feb 5th
  
• Linux Asia in New Delhi, Feb 8th
  

Thanks to all the students and mentors of The Summer of Code. Your work continues to stimulate others in the developer community!

Find us at FOSDEM

Two Googlers will be speaking at FOSDEM 2006, which takes place in Brussels on February 25th and 26th. Greg Stein will be talking about Subversion, and Jon Trowbridge will tell you all about Beagle.

If you see us there, come up and say hello: we'd love to talk to you!

New Project Released into Open Source: GTAGS

Google has a huge codebase, which makes navigation a challenge using the default ctags/etags mechanism with Emacs or Vim --- any TAGS files generated is large enough that the default search mechanism will take a long time to complete. We could make every project build its own TAGS file (thereby reducing the size of the indices), but that would have been cumbersome. We decided instead to build a TAGS server (available on SourceForge) that would serve the index for the entire Google source base over the intranet for code browsing purposes, which has the benefit of speeding up code browsing dramatically as well as providing a way to look up any function anywhere in the code base.

Many open source projects have a significant amount of source code as well, and we hope that this enhancement to TAGS will be useful to the open source community.

Enjoy!

Ken Ashcraft, Arthur Gleckler, Leandro Groisman, Piaw Na, Arun Sharma

How do developers use HTML?

As part of our work with the WHAT working group, who are writing proposals for a new version of HTML, we have done some research into what aspects of HTML authors are using today. We took a sample of slightly over a billion documents, and looked at what elements were used on the most pages, what class names were used on the most pages, and so forth. The results are quite interesting!

Heading to PyCon

Googlers love Python, so we're really excited about going to PyCon
this year. Over half a dozen Googlers are attending, and several will
be giving talks:

• Guido van Rossum is giving a keynote speech on Saturday.
• Jeremy Hylton is talking about the C Python bytecode compiler.
• Brian W. Fitzpatrick is talking about the cvs2svn project.

We hope to see you there!