[haiku-development] GSOC Proposal Stubs
- From: Sean Healy <jalopeura@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 2 Apr 2011 09:07:03 +0100
Hi,
Between my partition table troubles and a busy week at school, this is
the first chance I've had since the student application period opened
to talk about GSOC. I'm interested in a few ideas from the list, and I
have a couple other ideas as well.
Before writing up my proposal (or maybe proposals), I'd like to know
which of these projects are of most interest to the community, and
which are likely to have mentors available.
From the ideas page:
CIFS/SMB file system (Windows shares)
For this project, I would work on read and write support for
Windows/Samba shares and a tool to browse available shares on the
netowrk. I would not include hosting shares, because I think including
that would take more time than available.
Preflet refactoring
This one would be a collection of smaller jobs rather than one large-
scale project. But it would probably be the most helpful to the
community in general.
Improvements to the mail system
This one appeals to me because I'm now using Mail on a regular basis.
I'm a little concerned because I've seen some other ideas for a project
involving Mail, and I'm not sure there's more than one potential mentor
for a Mail project.
Language bindings for the C++ API
I submitted a similar idea two years ago, but just for Perl. I've
learned more about SWIG since then, so I could do it in SWIG now. The
main problem with that is that SWIG cannot do the really interesting
stuff: callbacks. That means no messages or hooks. Each scripting
language would have to handle that itself. However, for basic
functionality, we'd only really need MessagesReceived for BApplication
and BWindow, so there'd only be two callbacks to handle. I could do it
for Perl, and with a bit of research, I could maybe figure out how to
handle callbacks from C++ in Python. (At least in Perl I wouldn't need
to know Perl in order to write a C++ extension for Perl; I'd just need
to know some of C data structures used internally by Perl.) But I'd
need someone who knows Python to contribute some Python test scripts.
Other ideas:
Planner/Organizer
I've mentioned this one on the mailing list before. Someone indicated
that someone else is already working on one, so maybe there's not much
interest in this. However, I was also planning on handling reminders
via an alarm server. This alarm server would then be available to any
other application that wanted to use it.
Port wxWidgets.
I asked about this on the wx-dev mailing list, and they're not very
interested from their end. Someone expressed the opinion that a port to
Haiku would not reach a very wide audience, which I think is a
legitimate concern. On the other hand, they have two other ports on
their ideas page, so it seems that they think a port is doable within
the GSOC timeframe. And there is someone on the wx-dev list who once
upon a time started work on a BeOS port, who said he could help me.
Between him and a mentor, I'd have help from both the Haiku and wx
sides.
Thanks,
Sean
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