Category:Summer Coding 2010 ideas

This page holds all the ideas suggested by community members for the Fedora Summer Coding 2010 program.

Scroll to the bottom of this page for all the pages in the 2010 ideas category.

Other ideas that were incomplete or worth considering from the past are found at Summer coding ideas for 2009.

Looking for JBoss.org ideas? http://community.jboss.org/wiki/GoogleSummerofCode2010

Process

1. Think in terms of use cases.

   If you provide a use case and some ideas of how to solve, you give more room for students to put in their own ideas and passion.

   Consider if that is possible for each of your project ideas.

2. Prepare a project idea page, part of which is included on this page.

   To learn how to add an idea to this page, read How to create an idea page for Summer Coding.

3. Use talk page to discuss ideas and proposals.

   Use the discussion tab (Talk:Name of idea) page for all discussion about an idea.

   Idea pages should be renamed as proposals when accepted, and all discussion about the proposal should also go in the talk page.

Idea page sample

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - Idea page sample.

Status:

Summary of idea:

Contacts:

Mentor(s):

Notes:

RHQ

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - RHQ.

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Various ideas related to RHQ: http://rhq-project.org

Contacts: Heiko W. Rupp <hwr @ redhat.com >, pilhuhn on irc.freenode.net/#rhq

Mentor(s): Heiko W. Rupp

Notes: Ideas are e.g. better visual representation of the inventory (graphical forests), new graphing code for metrics (as DOM+CSS+JS versions), allowing different availability check interval for 'important' resources, separating agent heart beat from availability messages or combining data from different resources and types to trigger alerts on this combined data ("Correlation units"). Other ideas are very welcome. Also check the Ideas wiki page at http://rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Ideas

KDE Netbook Spin

The main page for this proposal is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - KDE Netbook Spin.

Status: Accepting Applications

Summary of idea: The creation of an official KDE Netbook Edition Spin for Fedora 14

Contacts: Ryan Rix < rrix fedoraproject.org >, rrix on irc.freenode.net/#fedora-kde

Mentor(s): Ryan Rix rrix on irc.freenode.net/#fedora-kde, Jaroslav Reznik jreznik on irc.freenode.net/#fedora-kde

Welcome Wizard

The main page for Summer Coding 2010 ideas is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - Welcome Wizard.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea: A step by step process of joining the Fedora Project.

Contacts: Mike McGrath

Mentor(s): Mike McGrath

Notes: Right now when new users sign up for an account, they have NO idea what to do next. One common thing is applying for a bunch of seemingly random groups, then trying to ssh to fedorapeople. Then just having your applications sit there... forever never getting approved.

I'd like for the account system to have a simple wizard interface (via a plugin), welcomes users, explains how Fedora works and explains how to apply for groups and what to expect. We may have to come up with a standard way to apply for groups, to be discussed.

PackageDB Enhancements

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - PackageDB Enhancements.

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: The Fedora PackageDB contains information that both developers and end users would find useful about the applications and packages in Fedora. There are a large variety of changes that could be useful for it ranging from the mundane (example: porting to TurboGears2, adjusting the way we link between the Application and Package interfaces) to redesigning the database model, or including new features.

Contacts: Toshio Kuratomi

Mentor(s): Toshio Kuratomi

Notes: Some ideas are listed on https://fedorahosted.org/packagedb/wiki/ToDo

Copr

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - Copr.

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Copr (Cool Other Package Repo) is a Fedora project to help make building and managing third party package repositories easy. Copr is being implemented this summer by Seth Vidal and Toshio Kuratomi. They would welcome help from interested students.

Contacts: Toshio Kuratomi(abadger1999)

Mentor(s): Toshio Kuratomi(abadger1999)

Notes: More information about Copr

Gnome - Nautilus Search dialog

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - Gnome - Nautilus search.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea: Nautilus is the default file manager for Gnome desktop. The current state of the search dialog is suboptimal, our goal is to make it more rich and provide more options. For example, when we had set Tracker as the primary search engine, we also committed users to use their fulltext search by default. An option switching between filename-based matching and fulltext search would be great addition. Additional filters would also be a great asset.

Contacts: Tomáš Bžatek

Mentor(s): Tomáš Bžatek

Notes: See upstream bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612725#c6 for details

CHASM

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - CHASM.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea: Various ideas related to CHASM

Contacts: Rob Escriva, Ben Boeckel (mathstuf)

Mentor(s): Rob Escriva, Ben Boeckel (mathstuf)

Notes: CHASM, the Cryptographic-Hash-Algorithm-Secured Mirroring solution, is a project that is to help alleviate a lot of the pains that mirrors have in organizing and verifying their content. The project can be thought of as a stateful rsync daemon in some respects, and solves a problem that kernel.org and a number of other large mirroring infrastructures have been looking into for several years now. This is ultimately a project that will be used by a greater portion of the larger mirroring infrastructures and as such has a lot of need for high performance and good design.

DGC GTK GUI

The main page for this Summer Coding 2010 ideas is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - DGC GTK GUI.

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: The proposed work is to write the GTK GUI for Digital Gate Compiler (DGC) to use the latest GTK+ 2.0 API. This is Fedora Electronic Lab ticket #73: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-electronic-lab/ticket/73

Contact: Shakthi Kannan , "mbuf" at irc.freenode.net/#fedora-india

Mentor(s): Shakthi Kannan , "mbuf" at irc.freenode.net/#fedora-india

Notes:

Infinispan

The main page for this idea is http://community.jboss.org/wiki/StudentContributorProjectswithInfinispan.

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Improvements to Infinispan project (http://www.jboss.org/infinispan)

Contacts: Manik Surtani <manik @ jboss.org>

Mentor(s): Manik Surtani

Notes: Ideas are

• ISPN-272 Recover from transaction failures
• ISPN-127 Ability to bring up/take down nodes based on SLAs
• ISPN-374 Add event handling to HotRod
• ISPN-57 Support Google App Engine
• ISPN-200 Distributed queries
• ISPN-262 Geographically distributed data grid
• ISPN-263 Handle MERGE events to deal with split brains

Please check details at the Student/Contributor Projects with Infinispan wiki page at http://community.jboss.org/wiki/StudentContributorProjectswithInfinispan

Seam Framework

The main page for this idea is http://seamframework.org/Community/StudentProjects.

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Improvements and new features to seam Framework (http://seamframework.org/)

Contacts: Pete Muir <pmuir @ redhat.com>

Mentor(s): Pete Muir

Notes: Ideas are

• JBoss ESB integration with CDI
• Errai (GWT) integration with CDI
• Errai (GWT) integration with CDI events
• Errai (GWT) integration with Seam Security
• Extensible project management tooling environment (based on Maven and Maven Archetypes)
• Conversations with remote EJBs

Please check details at the Student Projects wiki page at http://seamframework.org/Community/StudentProjects

FSoC - Four Seasons of Code

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - FSoC.

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Student Project Management System

Contacts: Shreyank Gupta <shreyankg @ fedoraproject.org >, Shrink on irc.freenode.net/#fedora-india

Mentor(s): Shreyank Gupta

Notes: The idea is to develop an application which would allow Mentors and Students to collaborate effectively and get the process of mentoring automated.

Kronikarz - Simple Tool for Desktop Backup / Restore

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - Kronikarz - shortinfo.

The main page for Summer Coding 2010 ideas is Category:Summer Coding 2010 ideas.

Status: "Idea"

Summary of idea: Handy graphical tool for archiving settings of desktop applications. This tool will be useful for users who:

• want to simply backup / restore look-and-feel and settings of desktop applications;
• frequently migrate from one distribution to another;
• have more then one device and want to sync settings.

Contacts: Alexei Panov

Mentor(s): Alexei Panov

Notes: Tool can be written to work with plugins (preferrable) or just bunch of configuration files to describe backup / restore / sync methods and enable support for certain application.

Proposed features:

• Easy search and select installed applications for backup / restore / sync
• Can work as application or as daemon
• Has scheduler and backup / restore / sync settings (archive type, passwords, compression rate, additive/solid, etc.)
• Custom selection of applications for archiving (one, group, all, etc.)
• Restoring data from archive with tracking of current application, nonexistent on target machine applications should be reinstalled from PackageKit
• Including user selected files in archive for restoring on target machine (possibly searching and automatic including configuration files or files of specified types).

Unified Mobile Sync

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - Unified Mobile Sync - shortinfo.

The main page for Summer Coding 2010 ideas is Category:Summer Coding 2010 ideas.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea: Synchronization tool for mobile devices. The creation of tool for data synchronization between mobile devices and desktop, such as contacts, calendar, schedule, tasks, messages. Today mobility is a major trend, so enabling synchronization between mobile and desktop is important for Linux desktop adoption.

Contacts: Alexey Vasyukov

Mentor(s): For the moment Alexey Vasyukov

Notes: Proposed features:

• Synchronization of contacts and calendar (required), tasks and messages (desired)
• Support for popular mobile devices, simple extensibility for new gadgets via plugins
• Support for popular desktop applications, simple extensibility for other via plugins
• Simple graphical synchronization tuning tool – what to synchronize, scheduling, rules (filters, conflict resolution, etc.)
• Enabling mobile device backup and restore
• Desirably running not only on Linux, but also on Windows and MacOS (TBD)
• Think about future integration with open source collaboration suites and unified communication systems.

Current state

The current stage (stage 1) is about research and architecture design. It can not be stuck to certain technologies. You need a broad vision of different technologies to be successful at this stage.

Current stage will take at least 2-3 months. After it we will determine coding tasks and timeline and proceed to stage 2 - prototype implementation.

The tasks for current stage:

• Find out how to upload/download to/from popular mobile devices (Android, iPhone, Symbian, PalmOS, Win Mobile, BB, etc) contacts, messages, calendars, todos, media content, etc. It includes studying what data is accessible, in what format we are to process it, what protocols-libraries-APIs should be used. As a result we should get clear understanding what and how can be synced for different devices. This task will require gathering and reading tons of technical documentation and writing code to check if documentation is really true. I can not predict what programming languages, libraries, standards and protocols you will encounter.

• Find out how to upload/download to/from popular desktop apps (Evolution, Thunderbird, KDE PIM, Outlook, etc) contacts, messages, calendars, todos, media content, etc. Once again, it includes studing what is accessible, in what format, via which channels. As a result we should get clear understanding what and how can be synced with different apps. This task will require, similarly with the previous one, reading documentation and writing tests. Once again, I can not predict what programming languages, libraries, standards and protocols you will encounter.

• Find out how to integrate mobile sync into current system infrastructure for Linux desktop (dbus, udev, PackageKit, etc) and, probably, Windows desktop (???). This task will require very good knowledge of system design.

• Prepare concept of GUI application and implement the first version (with placeholders instead of real sync plugins). This task will require knowledge of cross-platform programming with Python or C/C++ and GTK/Qt/etc. Knowledge of GUI design and usability will be a big advantage.

• Prepare the architecture based on the results of tasks #1-4. The architecture should meet the requirements [1]. Determine tasks for complete UMS implementation.

From my point of view each of the tasks #1-4 will require few person-months. Task #5 will be solved collaboratively.

KDE fingerprint support for various components

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - KDE fingerprint support.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea: The aim of this project is to finish fingerprint support for various KDE core components and package it for Fedora. The current code supports KDM login & KDE locking and sits in KDE SVN playground. Support to other KDE componenets have to be done - Polkit KDE auth. agent, kdesu etc. Code should be accepted by upstream and should go through KDE review to be shipped in official KDE SC releases.

Contacts: Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik@redhat.com>

Mentor(s): Jaroslav Reznik & KDE SIG

KDE Usability recording tool

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - KDE Usablity tool.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea: Usability engineers regularly administer usability sessions. Within these sessions there are a number of things that they need to record:

The three most notable are the screen of the user being tested

• An external camera source

• An external microphone

These must be compressed and multiplexed together, compressed. The tool must be able to open these files, export them to other more conventional types, i.e. an OGG simply of the users screen.

Contacts: Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik@redhat.com>, Lukas Tinkl <ltinkl@redhat.com>

Mentor(s): Jaroslav Reznik, Lukas Tinkl & mentor @ university

Notes: for FIT BUT/FI MUNI students only

GNU Smalltalk package revamping

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - GNU Smalltalk package revamping.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea: The GNU Smalltalk virtual machine is a monolithic package in Fedora, and is not updated often. By contrast, the Debian package separates all of the provided bindings into separate packages, which allows to install the VM with fewer dependencies—for example without GTK+ support, or without Expat, and so on.

The project aims at providing a similar level of flexibility for the Fedora package. In addition, it would be good to have a way to generate from the same source the Fedora .spec file, the Windows installer (currently done with a custom shell script that uses the Fedora mingw32 cross-compilation environment), and the Debian package.

Contacts: Paolo Bonzini

Mentor(s): Paolo Bonzini

Unified ink level reporting

The main page for this proposal is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - Unified ink level reporting.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea: Several printer drivers are capable of reporting the amount of remaining ink or toner in the printer they are driving, but they all do it in different ways. Usually there is a command line program that the user has to know about and run (and interpret the output). For gutenprint there is escputil. For HPLIP there is hp-levels. And so on.

CUPS provides a unified framework for all drivers to report marker levels in the same way, viewed and queried from a single user interface. The same interface can be used for other "special" functions such as cleaning/aligning the print heads, printing a self-test page, etc. We just need the printer drivers to conform to this way of doing things.

Changing both gutenprint and hplip would be sufficient to cover a large number of printer models.

Contacts: Tim Waugh

Mentor(s): Tim Waugh

Advanced application installer

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - Advanced application installer.

The main page for Summer Coding 2010 ideas is Category:Summer Coding 2010 ideas.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea:

Existing application installer is not customizable. Users cannot add items freely. Our goal is to build a customizable application installer. For example, users can add comment for software. Software introduction can be changed. New software items can be added. Existing software items can be removed. Under the user's permission, the changes to the software items can be uploaded to a web service on google app-engine, therefore other users will obtain a benefit by downloading the changes. This application installer supports extensions. Users can add their own function.

Ailurus is a simple application installer [1]. It helps install popular applications easily on Fedora. Our work is to write code for Ailurus.

[1] http://ailurus.googlecode.com

Contacts: Homer Xing

Mentor(s): Homer Xing

Gnome File Sharing Administration Tool

Name: Gnome File Sharing Administration Tool

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 ideas - Gnome File Sharing Administration Tool.

Status: Idea

Summary of idea: KDE has taken an advance on file sharing which is Kcm-filesharing by allowing the user list all samba/nfs shares and allow the user to configure the shares centrally and graphically, while which is required but not supplied by Gnome. The proposed project aims to create a utility that should provide a graphical administration tool to configure both samba system shares and nfs shares. It is able to manage the file sharing management, authentication, and other most worthy configurations of samba and nfs.

Contacts: Yang Jie

Mentor(s): looking for a mentor

Beacon

The main page for this idea is Summer Coding 2010 Ideas - Beacon.

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea:

The idea is to have an inline DocBook XML editor in Zikula (or the Fedora instance of Zikula).

The preliminary tasks are to:

1. Enable Zikula setup with DocBook support.
2. Enable wiki-like editing setup that can support revisions too
3. Enable XSL support for parsing of docbook to and from html

Contacts:

Satya Komaragiri

Mentor(s):

1. Satya Komaragiri
2. Nandeep Mali