Hi, very happy to see a enthusiastic reply!
We are still working on our project ideas. I will leave the respective mentorsThe wiki page is so nice, though I had known syscall before, reading that wiki is interesting and useful.
for each project give some more information.
In the case of the LibreOffice port, we are in contact with LibreOffice to see
if they can help us with mentoring it, too.
Generic advice for this generic question. There is no magic involved in kernel
development, and it is not this much different from userland development.
Some documents on the website document some aspects. Here are some I can think
of:
https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/hello_kernel_you_have_a_syscall_from_userland
(interfacing between kernel and userland)
https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/welcome_to_kernel_debugging_land ;
(debugging facilities built into our kernel)
https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/device_driver_basics ;(writing drivers)
I'm sure you will find more detailed answers on this mailing list if you have
more precise questions. You can also join our IRC channel where other devs and
users can provide some help.
I have to note that we don't know yet if Haiku will be part of the acceptedIf Haiku could not be the accepted organization this year, I still have interests in contributing to it, as Haiku seems very cool and interesting(not to mentioned that contributing to a OS is cool enough). The reason why I choose a new community is that I meet a bottleneck in Wine developing and Wine lacks of a way to nurture students.
organizations. Just so you are warned, in the last two years we didn't make it.
If you have not done this yet, I would suggest installing Haiku (you will need
it for all of our GSoC ideas, I think) in a virtual machine or on real
hardware. Our application process requires all students to submit at least a
small patch in relation to the idea they want to apply to. Depending on the
project, this could be a patch to Haiku, or to the project you will contribute
to. We want to check that you are able to checkout and compile the sources, and
use git to format and submit a patch (believe it or not, it turns out some
students apply, who are not able to achieve this).
Yep. I am not sure that whether porting LibreOffice is a labor work, I will do more study on it. I would appreciate for your thoughts. If I choose it as a target, I will dig into it.
As you noticed, our ideas are rather short and not very detailed. We expect the
student to do some research on the project ideas. For example, if you plan to
dig into porting LibreOffice, a good start would be (after getting Haiku up and
running) to get the LibreOffice sources with the early work done here:
https://github.com/kapix/libreoffice_core and see if you can get it to compile.
