Summer coding ideas for 2012

Please feel free to add your idea here.

If you are a student and willing to suggest an idea please use the Students Idea wiki page. Interested mentors can check the Students Idea page and undertake any interested idea those students are suggesting.

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

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GSOC_2012

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

Further, last year accepted ideas from the Fedora Project can be found at GSoC 2011 web site

Students Welcome

If you are a student looking forward to participate the GSoC 2012 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 2012 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. Karsten Wade(Quaid)
3. Susmit Shannigrahi(Susmit)
4. Mo Duffy (Duffy)
5. Mo Morsi

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!!!

Idea list for GSoC 2012

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

Bringing the Fedora Desktop to the Cloud

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Aeolus is an umbrella project that provides an open source API which to control any number of backend proprietary cloud providers. It allows us to write tooling that is able to deploy, monitor, and manager instances to any cloud provider such as EC2 or OpenStack in a Free and Open Manner. We need more tooling to interface with the various Aeolus components from the Fedora desktop (or any other) in novel ways such as command-line and gtk-based applications to deploy instances to the cheapest cloud provider or the one with the fastest response time, to monitor running instances using various visualizations, and more closely integrate local data and code w/ that on the cloud.

Knowledge prerequisite:

Skill level:

Contacts: Mo Morsi

Mentor(s): Mo Morsi

Notes: Ping me (mmorsi on freenode) for more info about the Aeolus project. All the components which to build images for the cloud and control instances is in place and ready to go, just drop various bits (they are interoperable and interchangable) into an environment to be able to interact with the cloud, avoiding proprietary interfaces and vendor lockin.

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.

Knowledge prerequisite:

Skill level:

Contacts: itamarjp [AT] fedoraproject [DOT] org

Mentor(s): Dennis Gilmore Toshio kuratomi

Notes:

Put together a toolchain for recording screencasts easily

Status: Proposed - Draft

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 problem, though. Creating really good screencasts on Fedora, then 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.

The goal of this project is to create a toolchain (a recommended collection of software available in the Fedora repositories) and a comprehensive tutorial for how to create an professional-looking screencast. The student will get support and advice from the Fedora Videos team since they are trying to learn how to create these screencasts.

One possible project is to add sound recording support to the Gnome 3 desktop recorder. Currently, the desktop recorder only grabs the video of the screen.

Knowledge prerequisite: gstreamer, video and sound editing, blender

Skill level: Medium to High

Contacts: Fedora Videos Team

Mentor(s): ???

Notes:

Infrastructure for Fedora contributors and users

Implement a survey infrastructure for the Fedora Project

Status: Proposed - Draft

Summary of idea: Surveys are important to increase the quality of a service, and it is true for the Fedora project as well.(discussions [1]) In this project it is supposed to implement a survey infrastructure facility so that the contributors can use for various activities as per the need.

The concern is to develop a simple web base survey system OR implement a existing survey project and customized as required, so that contributors can easily create surveys and dig for results as well. Linking with the [FAS|FAS] is required. Further it should be compatible with anonymous and open ID so that if the creator set for those authentication the survey should allow those authentications. Statistics and other required reports can be obtained. So that it is easy to analyse.

Knowledge prerequisite: PHP, Python, Ruby are preferred, MySQL (database handling), experience with Lime Survey would be an advantage

Skill level: Medium

Contacts: kevin [AT]scrye [DOT] com , bckurera [AT] fedoraproject [DOT] org

Mentor(s): Kevin Fenzi - Mentor, Buddhike Kurera Co-mentor.

Notes: This idea is improving, please contact for upto-date details.

Design Hub: FLOSS Collaboration for FLOSS Designers

Status: Proposed - Draft

Summary of idea: Free software designers don't have a great set of tools to work with to collaborate with each other and with the community on their design work. With this project, we'd like to make progress towards fixing that. We have some disparate ideas / tools that we'd like to be integrated:

• Sparkleshare - a git-backed, Dropbox like system that will automatically check in and push files in project directly to a shared git repo
• Magic Mockup - a coffeescript/javascript you can insert into an SVG of mockups to enable interactive, click-through mockups (see a demo here
• Design Hub - an idea and a ruby on rails prototype of a web front end that could potentially serve as a front end to git repos with design assets *and* serve as well as a front end to magic mockup mockups in said repos
• Inkscape is our preferred design tool of choice; it would be great if it had some GUI integration with Magic Mockup, Sparkleshare, and Design Hub

Knowledge prerequisite:

Skill level:

Contacts: duffy at fedoraproject [dot] org

Mentor(s): Mo Duffy, Emily Dirsh

Notes: We can provide a development platform for the web UI at openshift.redhat.com. Also, note this project doesn't just benefit Fedora designers, but it benefits all FLOSS designers.

Implement a unit test framework for fedpkg and rpkg

Status: Proposed - Draft

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: jkeating [AT]redhat [DOT] com

Mentor(s): User:jkeating - Mentor

Notes: This project is in python.

Insight use cases for calendar

Status: Proposed - Draft

Insight project requirement to be implemented. More details can be found at the wiki, Insight_use_cases_for_calendar

Knowledge prerequisite: Knowledge on PHP and Drupal would be essential

Skill level: Medium

Contacts: Paul W. Frields, Clint Savage & Insight Team

Mentor(s): María "tatica", Peter Tibor Borsa and Buddhika Kurera

Notes: -

Insight use cases for status and microblogging

Status: Proposed - Draft

These are use cases for status and microblogging services that we might want to provide through Insight. More details can be found at the wiki, Insight_use_cases_for_status_and_microblogging

Knowledge prerequisite: Knowledge on Drupal would be essential.

Skill level: High

Contacts: Paul W. Frields

Mentor(s): -

Notes: Students who are interested on this topic is highly requested to contact the mentors as the first step. Knowledge on Drupal would be essential.

isitfedoraruby.com

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Right now most Ruby programmers make use of the gem package management system to install Ruby libraries on their system. The Fedora/Ruby community works hard to convert these gems into rpms for inclusion in the Fedora stack, making use of various tooling such as gem2rpm. We are looking for more tools and capabilities around Ruby / Fedora integration, namely to reduce the overhead in supporting Ruby on Fedora and to promote Fedora as the de-facto platform for Ruby development.

As part of this, we would like to develop a isitfedoraruby.com website (similar to isitruby19 and other sites like it) to promote the ruby stack on Fedora and the Fedora/Ruby development effort, highlighting success stories, use cases, ways contributors can help, etc

Knowledge prerequisite:

Skill level:

Contacts: Mo Morsi

Mentor(s): Mo Morsi

Notes: Ping me (mmorsi on freenode) for more info. This project should be written in Ruby

Setup Gitlab as a front end for Fedora Hosted git repositories

Status: Proposed - Draft

Summary of idea: To setup Gitlab as a front end for git repositories at [fedorahosted.org].

Git has fundamentally improved the way that developers share code. The barrier to sharing code has virtually been eliminated. We are also seeing the emergence of a new dynamic called "Social Coding". There's no better example of this than Github.

Creating an environment to foster social coding, and a low barrier to sharing code, requires more than just git, though. A lot of what makes Github successful with git is the web-based front end. That explains why there is such a dramatic difference between Github and fedorahosted.org, and why many projects are moving to Github instead.

Fortunately, there is an open source application named Gitlab that provides much of the interactive functionality and usability that is found at Github. The goal of this project is to bring that experience to fedorahosted.org by setting up Gitlab.

This project will require working with the infrastructure team to get the necessary prerequisites installed, find a server to host the application and configure the existing projects to be wired to this interface.

Knowledge prerequisite: Ruby, git, Linux system administration (web servers, authentication)

Skill level: Medium

Contacts: Dan Allen

Mentor(s): None yet.

Notes: This idea is something we need, but we don't yet have a driver for it. A demo of Gitlab can be found here: http://gitlabhq.com/demo.html

Improving Fedora packaging

Java API/ABI changes checker

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Libraries written in Java add, remove and modify their public interfaces from time to time. This is normal, but currently it is very hard to guess effect an update of library to new version will have on rest of the system. What is needed is a tool that would be able to tell us that "With update of package java-library to version 2.0, function X(b) has been removed. This function is used in package java-app". There are already a few open-source projects that can do some of the analysis needed. This would be of interest to whole Java world I believe and would enable safer and easier updates. To get an idea of similar projects see Java API compliance checker and Python Javaclass project

Knowledge prerequisite: Knowledge of Java (inheritance rules, generics, etc.) and probably some scripting language(s)

Skill level: Fairly high

Contacts: Stanislav Ochotnický

Mentor(s): Stanislav Ochotnický

Notes: Don't hesitate to get in touch via IRC (sochotni@FreeNode) or email (contact on my user page).

Maven FOSS Repository Extension

Status: Proposed - Draft

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 Fedora Maven Extension.

Knowledge prerequisite: Knowledge of Maven

Skill level: Medium

Contacts: Carlo de Wolf

Mentor(s): Carlo de Wolf

Notes: You can find me at irc.freenode.net #fedora-java wolfc

Fedora Spins and remixes

Fedora Audio Creation Spin

Status: Proposed - Draft

Summary of idea: To create a Fedora Audio spin showcasing the rich and diverse landscape of Linux Audio production.

The Fedora Audio Creation SIG is a collection of enthusiastic Fedora users driven by the common desire to make the best Linux distribution also the best for Music creation and Audio Production.

We are looking for one or two candidates to assist us in the complete development cycle of this project. The bulk of the effort lies in packaging open source audio projects and integrating many of the packages from the PlanetCCRMA repository into Fedora. Other tasks may include the testing of kickstart files and developing small applications to better integrate with the Fedora Desktop.

Ideally, interested candidates will have a passion for Music/Audio Production. Basic scripting knowledge and the ability to compile projects from source is a must. Sponsored packagers / knowledge of the Fedora Packaging Guidelines and/or the desire to continuing maintaining the packaged software post-project considered a plus.

Interested? Why wait, submit an audio package for review and get sponsored (Join_the_package_collection_maintainers).

Knowledge prerequisite: Scripting/programming (bash/python)

Skill level: Rudimentry

Contacts: Brendan Jones

Mentor(s): Brendan Jones

Fedora JBoss Spin

Status: Proposed - Draft

Summary of idea: To create a Fedora JBoss spin that helps Java developers get started quickly using JBoss software.

The Java SIG and the JBoss AS 7 on Fedora Initiative is a cross-section of enthusiastic Fedora users driven by the common desire to make the Fedora the best OS for developing with JBoss software.

We are looking for one or two candidates to assist us in the complete development cycle of this project. The bulk of the effort lies in packaging open source Java and JBoss projects and integrating many of the packages from the JBoss Community into Fedora. Packages in particular include JBoss AS 7, JBoss Tools and JBoss Forge. Other tasks may include the testing of kickstart files and developing configurations to better integrate with the Fedora Desktop.

There could be two variants of this spin (feel free to choose). One is on the developer needing a good desktop to create JBoss-based applications (things like Eclipse + JBoss Tools, AS 7, Forge, a database, and so on). The other focus is on getting a server setup so that it can run the application. That would also be where the upcoming OpenShift toolset will come into play.

Ideally, interested candidates will have a passion for Java development using JBoss software. Basic scripting knowledge and the ability to compile Java projects from source is a must. Sponsored packagers / knowledge of the Fedora Packaging Guidelines and/or the desire to continuing maintaining the packaged software post-project considered a plus, but not required.

Interested? Why wait, submit a Java package for review and get sponsored (Join the package collection maintainers).

Knowledge prerequisite: Scripting/programming (Java, shell)

Skill level: Rudimentary

Contacts: Marek Goldmann, Carlo de Wolf, Andrew Rubinger, [Max Andersen https://community.jboss.org/people/maxandersen]

Mentor(s): Marek Goldmann, Carlo de Wolf

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

RHQ-agent to interface with Matahari

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Write a RHQ-agent in Python and make it interface with Matahari to pick up metrics that are provided by Matahari from Fedora or RHEL systems. The agent would talk to the RHQ server via the REST api and push metrics to RHQ etc. This agent will not implement the full functionality of the RHQ java agent.

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

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

Skill level: Medium to High

Contacts: Heiko Rupp <pilhuhn>

Mentor(s): Heiko Rupp <pilhuhn>

Notes: RHQ wiki is at http://rhq-project.org/