Re: looking for open tasks

jan matejek <matejcik-IaeKGDb/[email protected]> wrote:
> i've been watching Haiku for some time and waiting for a chance to
> contribute. That chance has finally come. For our Operating systems
> course, we have an assignment roughly along the lines of "find a 
> project
> and contribute to it in a significant way."
> So I and two fellow students have formed a team, and we would like to
> contribute to Haiku :)

Now that sounds like a nice idea ;-)

> Our skills: we can do C and C++, implement a simple kernel, and we 
> are
> in the process of being taught how to write a device driver.
> 
> The question is: what should we do?
> 
> I.e., i am looking for an open task, that:
> a) has something to do with kernel (in the traditional sense, so it
> could be Kernel, Storage, Network and probably even something else in 
> here)
> b) can be finished by three people in roughly 8 weeks student-time*
> c) you would like to have finished in about 12 weeks from now, well
> written and documented. (and i mean that - after all, we do want to 
> earn
> our points)
> d) nobody else is working on it, we need to be able to say 
> "everything
> from -here- (or from scratch) to -here- is our work"
> and optionally e) it would be nice if it could be split up into three
> roughly equivalent parts

That's not easy. I guess there are lots of things you could do, though, 
but at least e) is going to be difficult.

> * student-time includes fair amounts of slacking off and the fact 
> that
> 95% of code will be done during last 5% of time ;)

:-)

> Apart from that, it can be anything, from a driver for some piece of
> hardware we can obtain, to improving performance/cleaning up 
> something,
> porting a filesystem, implementing some API.
> I would just like to know what is needed and/or wanted.

If you all want to work together, there are a number of things you 
could do, like:
* writing a WiFi driver and a generic module that helps developing such 
drivers (ie. port a driver from OpenBSD, look at the WiFi layer of 
BSDs, Linux, ...)
* implement DVD-RAM support to the CD driver
* write a driver for some hardware you chose yourself :-)
* finish the PowerPC port
* write a FireWire stack
* write a BlueTooth stack (probably too big for just 8 weeks)
* implement write support of the disk device manager, and write a 
partitioning software using it.
* write more API tests, especially for POSIX :-)
* implement ZeroConf and/or Bonjour networking services
* implement ICMP error handling and propagating in the networking stack

Is there anything of interest in that list? If you have any other 
ideas, even rough ideas, please tell :-)
Of course, if you don't have any idea in particular, you could pick 10 
bugs from our bug tracker and solve those ;-)

> I wanted to post this to openbeos mailing list, but the subscription
> page is broken, so i'm posting here. Hope that doesn't cause any 
> problems.

That's strange, but I can reproduce it here, too. Hopefully, freelists 
will fix that ASAP.
I think writing a mail to this address might get you subscribed as 
well:
mailto:[email protected]?Subject=subscribe

Bye,
   Axel.


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