Summer coding ideas for 2014

Open For Ideas ! - This page is open for Ideas !, This page contains ideas from last year, that necessarily does not mean that they are valid for this year too. We are in the process of cleaning up the page.

Find an idea you like? Want to propose your own? See the Getting Started Guide with GSoC:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GSOC_2014

You may be interested in ideas from 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

Further, last year accepted ideas from the Fedora Project can be found at GSoC 2013 web site

Students Welcome

If you are a student looking forward to participate the GSoC 2014 with Fedora, please feel free to browse the idea list which is still growing. Do not hesitate to contact the mentors/ contributors as indicated in this page for any related clarification. If you are new to The Fedora project, following material would help you to get started. Further please sign-up with the Fedora Account System(FAS) if you are willing to continue with the Fedora project. #fedora-devel, IRC channel can be used to get instant support.

1. The Foundation
2. Fedora Documentation (Users/ Contributors)
3. How to work with IRC?
4. Fedora Account System
5. Development

Supporting Mentors

Following contributors are also willing to support the GSoC 2014 program. (please feel free to add your self, attach the user page). Sometimes there should be some backing up mentors to mentor if the original mentor get busy with something for a short time period. In such case we need help.

1. Buddhike Kurera(Bckurera)
2. Kushal Das(Kushal)
3. Nitish Upreti(Myth17)
4. Lali Devamanthri(LSD)

Draft of an idea

Please add your idea as follows.

Project name

Status:

Summary of idea:

Knowledge prerequisite:

Skill level:

Contacts:

Mentor(s):

Notes:

!!!The draft was changed slightly, please add required field as required!!!

Open Idea list from GSoC 2013

Collaboration projects with other organizations

• TBA

Applications for desktop end users

These are coding projects that benefit end users of the Linux desktop.

Integrate Proxy Settings and Network Connections(Locations)

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: The system should use an appropriate networking profile (e.g. Proxy settings) for each network connection.

Gnome 2 had a concept of network locations in its Network Proxy configuration window. However, user should selected the appropriate location whenever he moves between networks. This idea is about providing an integration between NetworkManager and Desktop environments so that a user can create network profiles for each network location(connection) providing appropriate settings like proxy settings which is the main proposed setting here. NetworkManager can have a "Network Location" concept: for wireless networks, usually the name of the network (ESSID) is usually enough. For wired connections, DHCP servers can and usually do provide network's domain name, which can be used as the name of the location. It is nice if a user can associate each network location with a network settings profile which will be used whenever the user is connected to that network automatically. So, when you connect to a network, a corresponding network settings profile is activated automatically.

Knowledge prerequisite:

Skill level:

Contacts: Hedayat Vatankhah

Mentor(s):

Notes: There is an entry with some description in NetworkManager TODO which should be considered for the implementation

Web hosting control panel

Status: Proposed - Draft

Summary of idea: develop a free alternative of cpanel / plesk control panels, 100% compatible with fedora, and redhat enterprise Linux. written in python.

the control panel will be able to create domains and automatically setup apache, postfix, dovecot, mysql, postgresql bind etc...

Knowledge prerequisite: apache, postfix, dovecot, mysql, postgresql, proftpd, bind

Skill level: Medium

Contacts: itamarjp [AT] fedoraproject [DOT] org, kaustubh [DOT] karkare [AT] gmail [DOT] com

Mentor(s): Luis Bazan

Co-Mentor: Eduardo Echeverria

Notes: webhosting control panel draft

Assemble a toolchain for recording screencasts easily

Status: Proposed - Draft - Need a mentor

Summary of idea: Creating screencasts on Fedora and post-processing them for upload should be easy and fool proof.

The Fedora Videos project has been launched to bring together a collection of screencasts that help people learn how to use Fedora. There's only one major hurdle, though. Capturing really good screencasts on Fedora, post-processing them to include an intro and outro and other effects, and finally exporting them to an open format is challenging. There are lots of different tools, but each one only gets you part of the way there and you have to be the glue to make it all work. And then there are the bugs.

The goal of this project is to assemble a toolchain (a recommended collection of software available in the Fedora repositories) and write a comprehensive tutorial for how to create an professional-looking screencast. That may included chasing down & fixing bugs in the existing tools, discovering new tools and getting them packaged and learning about techniques in the environment around the computer, such as how to select & setup a microphone or how to draft a good speaking script. One possible task in the project is to add sound recording support to the Gnome 3 desktop recorder. Currently, the desktop recorder only grabs the video of the screen.

The student will get support and advice from the Fedora Videos team since they are trying to learn how to create these screencasts.

Knowledge prerequisite: gstreamer, video and sound editing, blender

Skill level: Medium

Contacts: Fedora Videos Team

Mentor(s): -

Notes:

Improve Fedora's Tablet User Experience

Status: Proposed - Draft

Summary of idea: Improving Fedora's Tablet User Experience.

The window managers/desktop environments officially supported by Fedora do not match the expectations of people with low power touch devices.

Fedora features new technology to reduce system load and - requirements, the user interface has not seen too much love.

Currently available interfaces for users are:

• Too Ressource Consuming
• Too Overloaded or
• Too Feature Poor
• Not Customizable With Reasonable Effort

The E17 Desktop Shell, developed as part of the Enlightenment Project, is a perfect match. It provides a rich interface, whilst consuming very little ressources. The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, on which E17 is built upon, were chosen as Foundation Block of Tizen, the MeeGo successor backed by Samsung and Intel. If things work out, E17 will be the first "real" Desktop Shell for Wayland.

Though it already provides special behaviour for touchscreen devices through certain modules, there's still room for improvement.

The overall goal of this project would be to improve the user experience of people who want to use Fedora on low power devices such as tablets.

The student will get support and advice from the Enlightenment Project developers.

Knowledge prerequisite: C, X11, Wayland, Enlightenment Foundation Libraries

Skill level: Medium to High

Contacts: Michael Bouchaud (yoz [at] efl [dot] so), Leif Middelschulte (leif [dot] middelschulte [at] student [dot] kit [dot] edu)

Mentor(s): Michael Bouchaud (yoz [at] efl [dot] so)

Notes: If this idea gets realized, a proper tablet spin can be created, that honors the spirit of Fedora.

Applications for programmers

Implement a binding translator for GlusterFS

Status: Proposed - Draft

Summary of idea: In transporting data across networks, programmers need GlusterFS language bindings to be able to create apps in their language of choice. A language binding translator would greatly increase the number of programmers who would be able to more easily extend GlusterFS. It's also a fun project for someone wanting to get some experience with multi-threaded architecture and design in the context of distributed systems and data.

Knowledge prerequisite: C, Python, embedded Python

Skill level: Medium to High

Contacts: johnmark [AT]redhat [DOT] com , abperiasamy [AT] gmail [DOT] com

Mentor(s): Anand Avati - Mentor, AB Periasamy - Co-mentor, John Mark Walker - Co-mentor

Notes: -

Implement a Cassandra/NoSQL Connector or Translator for GlusterFS

Status: Proposed - Draft

Summary of idea: In general, there is a need for the ability to store and access NoSQL data on general purpose distributed filesystems. Currently, there are a host of single-purpose methods for storing and retrieving NoSQL data, which are difficult to access from legacy applications. Creating a NoSQL translator for GlusterFS would help mitigate this problem and give developers more options for storing and accessing "big data" in a way that is accessible via a variety of standard toolkits and protocols.

Knowledge prerequisite: C, GlusterFS internals

Skill level: High

Contacts: johnmark [AT]redhat [DOT] com , abperiasamy [AT] gmail [DOT] com

Mentor(s): Anand Avati - Mentor, AB Periasamy - Co-mentor, John Mark Walker - Co-mentor

Notes: -

Embedded Cli tool for most popular DBMS

Status: Proposed - Students' Idea - Need a mentor

Summary of idea: Today, many developers are working with different DBMS. I propose to develop a common command line interface for most popular databases. For example: MySQL, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL.

Knowledge prerequisite: Java, JDBC, MySQL, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL.

Skill level: Medium

Contacts: Alexandr Egorov 0x0j023 [AT] gmail [DOT] com

Mentor(s):

Notes:

Linux kernel project

Implement nfs/fscache writeback cache (Dropped)

Status: Dropped -- This is a GSoC _2012_ idea and is being working on by Hongyi Jia although he didn't get the GSoC slot (http://www.jiayi.net/works/nfsfscache-writeback-cache/). So, I'm not going to mentor the idea this year and if anyone is really interested in it, feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to answer questions:-)

Summary of idea: Currently, the flashcache/bcache only works for local filesystems. For network filesystems, nfs only supports write through cache based on fscache/cachefiles. With wider adoption of SSD on nfs client side, it would be great for nfs to support writeback cache to speed up write intensive clients. This project would implement a writeback mechanism for nfs, which need to make necessary changes to kernel nfs, fscache and cachefiles modules, and take care of nfs close-to-open semantics.

Knowledge prerequisite: C, Linux kernel, nfs

Skill level: High

Contacts: bergwolf [AT] gmail [DOT] com

Mentor(s): Peng Tao - Mentor

Infrastructure for Fedora contributors and users

Infrastructure for FreeMedia group

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Fedora freemedia is a group of volunteers who ship fedora media on request to users worldwide. They use Trac to track these requests. The process is manual, the idea is to automate the process as much as possible.

Knowledge prerequisite: PHP, PostgreSQL

Skill level: Medium

Contacts: bckurera

Mentor(s):

Notes:

Implement a unit test framework for fedpkg and rpkg

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Unit tests are good. Testing is good. fedpkg and it's backend rpkg is a growing code base, gaining more and more contributors. It lacks a unit test framework which would be very beneficial to the code base for making sure contributions don't break the code in subtle ways.

Knowledge prerequisite:

Skill level:

Contacts:

Mentor(s):

Notes: This project is in python.

Dorrie: A web-interface for building Fedora spins/remixes

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Contribute to Dorrie, and make it more usable, add test coverage and deployable. Details at Dorrie.

Knowledge prerequisite: Python, Django

Skill level: Intermidiate

Contacts: Shreyank Gupta

Mentor(s): Shreyank Gupta, Ratnadeep Debnath

Notes: Features that I am looking to target:

* User management/FAS integration
* Un-linerize the workflow.
* Default wallpaper/Hostname/user-password/root-password
* Custom repos/RPMs
* Home directory content
* Search Packages
* Image type: ISO, virt image, raw disk

Code at https://github.com/shreyankg/Dorrie, fork and send pull request, if you are interested to contribute.

Fedpkg: Chain-builds for non-Rawhide branches

• Status: Proposed
• Summary of idea: Contribute to the fedpkg project, enabling the building of a series of interdependent packages in a single action for released Fedora branches
• Knowledge Prerequisite: Python, Fedora Packaging
• Skill Level: Low - Medium
• Contacts: Stephen Gallagher
• Mentor(s): Stephen Gallagher (Backup)
• Notes: https://fedorahosted.org/fedpkg/ticket/6

Linux system services

Implement a battery of unit tests for SSSD

• Status: Proposed
• Summary of idea: The purpose of this project is to develop a suite of unit tests for the SSSD. The unit tests would leverage mock objects to be able to exercise code that is otherwise only ever reachable when the SSSD is connected to the network. Contributing the set of unit tests to the SSSD would greatly improve its stability long-term and would help raise confidence when pushing new SSSD versions into Fedora or other distributions.
• Knowledge prerequisite: C programming
• Skill level: intermediate to high
• Contacts: Jakub Hrozek
• Mentor(s): Jakub Hrozek

Improving Fedora packaging

AUR Clone for Fedora

Status: Proposed - Students' Idea - Need a mentor

Summary of idea: The idea is to make an AUR clone for Fedora where users can submit buildfiles, which need to be hosted. These set of files can compile packages on the user side, and installed locally.

The benefit of this method is:

1. No need to host the entire packages (saving space on servers hosting the RPMs)
2. Make changes to the buildfile, and not compile the package
3. Can pull sources from any version control system/stored tarballs to make a very upto-date package. (See blog entry for an example)

Contacts: Anuj More

Notes: Need mentor. Need advice on feasibility of the software and issues that can arise. Also, read the extensive blog post on my blog.

Analogy: This is a lot like "having your own library" vs "getting a book from a bookstore". If you refer a book often, you'd keep it in your library. This would occupy space and consume resources. Otherwise, you'd just pull out a separate paper with instructions about the bookstore to find the book, and fetch the book from the store. Though the first method is hassle-free, it is not possible to have all the books in the world with you.

Maven FOSS Repository Extension

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: With the inception of Maven we have a means to standardize the building of Java projects. However it has also resulted in the usage of a very wide dependency set by these Java projects. This makes it very hard to integrate those projects on a single platform (be it Fedora or JBoss Application Server (or the combination)).

In essence during packaging all these dependencies must be lined up to form a single consistent component set. Thus each project will only have those components available which are actually available on the target platform. This is very hard to enforce using standard Maven setup.

For Fedora I'm envisioning a Maven extension that makes sure only sanctioned components are used during the build (without putting a burden on the packager). This will allow developers who are not on Fedora to also build with this extension and thus verify (and fix) issues which are the result of "Fedora packaging".

A prototype can be viewed at Maven FOSS Repository Extension.

Knowledge prerequisite: Knowledge of Maven

Skill level: Medium

Contacts: Carlo de Wolf, Mikolaj Izdebski

Mentor(s): Carlo de Wolf, Mikolaj Izdebski

Notes: You can find us at irc.freenode.net #fedora-java: wolfc and mizdebsk

Fedora Spins and remixes

Educational Application for Fedora Robotics Suite

Status: Proposed

Summary of Idea: Create an educational app introducing software from Fedora Robotics Suite

The Fedora Robotics SIG is creating a Robotics Suite consisting of many packages useful in robotics. We want to develop a demonstration application introducing new users step by step to core packages like Fawkes and Player/Stage. It would feature multiple game-like levels with increasing complexity. The general task would be to instruct the robot to fulfill a specific task in a simulation environment.

Knowledge prerequisite: Developing this requires a strong background in C++, a background in robotics is preferred but not necessary. You should be able to familiarize yourself with new software quickly. User visible parts will require GUI programming using Gtkmm.

Skill level: Medium to High

Contacts: Tim Niemueller

Mentor(s): Tim Niemueller

Applications for systems administrators

Improving the RHQ-PyAgent to interface with OpenLMI

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Improve the current RHQ-PyAgent written in Python that interfaces RHQ with OpenLMI to pick up metrics that are provided by OpenLMI from Fedora or RHEL systems. The agent is talking to the RHQ server via the REST api and push metrics to RHQ etc. This agent does/will not implement the full functionality of the RHQ java agent. The previous work is already pretty good, but it is cumbersome to add new OpenLMI-enabled servers and the types of the data model. The work of this year should concentrate on automating that process - perhaps after providing a range of IP addresses to query for servers. Similar for resource types, the agent would talk to the server to see what types are available and then check with the OpenLMI provider if this supports the same.

While RHQ is written in Java, this project does not require any Java knowledge.

Knowledge prerequisite: Python, Linux system administration, principles of REST

Skill level: Medium to High

Contacts: Heiko Rupp <pilhuhn>

Mentor(s): Heiko Rupp <pilhuhn>

Notes: RHQ wiki is at http://jboss.org/rhq, Previous years work: http://rhqagent.blogspot.com

Applications for Testers

Image Building Project

The image building project started last year as a gsoc project and while the progress was good, it isn't quite to the point where we need it to be for everyday usage. The emphasis would be on getting local image building to work before more work on distributing image building tasks got started.

Possible project components:

• side repository management
• better integration with bodhi and working based on updates instead of just package envrs
• tree replication
• integration with blockerbugs app
• deltaiso creation
• zsync for downloads
• integration with koji's new livecd scratch builds

Knowledge prerequisite: Some python experience is required, familiarity with Fedora's ISO build tools would be preferred

Skill level: Intermediate to advanced

Contacts: Tim Flink (tflink), Amit Saha

Mentor(s): Tim Flink (tflink), Amit Saha