commit 50ef270044ed4a6697e7e4820c1038ea380c3cd9
Author: Hiltjo Posthuma <hiltjo_AT_codemadness.org>
Date: Sat Nov 11 17:09:04 2017 +0100
update project ideas
Changes/rationale:
- There is no mentor program officially: community does peer review.
- Remove bugtracker project: the ML and TODO file is the "bugtracker".
- The mobile application platform is not suckless so remove it.
- Add geomyidae server link to the gopher idea.
- Remove some Linux-isms: suckless is for more platforms than Linux.
- Unix -> UNIX.
- Small typos.
- Add some punctuation.
diff --git a/suckless.org/project_ideas.md b/suckless.org/project_ideas.md
index bce3b04d..ffa974a8 100644
--- a/suckless.org/project_ideas.md
+++ b/suckless.org/project_ideas.md
_AT_@ -3,14 +3,9 @@ Project ideas
Please read our [philosophy](/philosophy) for background information.
-Mentors
--------
-We intend that each student will be the project leader of his/her particular
-project and the only individual with commit privilege for the repository.
-
-There will be one mentor and one backup mentor per project. In addition, the
-suckless.org community will act as a rigid external reviewer of the
-student's progress, as well as of the mentor's.
+Peer review
+-----------
+The suckless.org community will act as a rigid reviewer of the progress.
General ideas
-------------
_AT_@ -18,37 +13,33 @@ Our project ideas in general intend to focus on our innovative development
environment from bare hardware to the graphical interface.
* Graphical user interfaces for developers (such as more advanced
- concepts for mail clients, messaging clients, music players, text editors)
+ concepts for mail clients, messaging clients, music players, text editors).
* Web applications for developers following our GUI concepts (issue and bug
- tracking)
-* Mobile applications for developers that integrate well into our general
- development environment
-* General userland enhancements to Unix-like operating systems, in particular
- Linux
-* Foundations of a new windowing system for Unix-like operating systems
-* Improvements to our existing software projects
-* Replacements of bloated existing software in a suckless way.
+ tracking).
+* General userland enhancements to UNIX-like operating systems.
+* Foundations of a new windowing system for UNIX-like operating systems.
+* Improvements to our existing software projects and infrastructure.
+* Replacements of bloated existing software and libraries in a suckless way.
Concrete ideas
--------------
The listed ideas generally require good knowledge of C and experience with
-Unix-like operating systems. The difficulty ranges from medium to high.
-An academic background in computer science is desirable but not essential.
+UNIX-like operating systems. The difficulty ranges from medium to high.
### Suckless font rendering library
There is libdrw in suckless now, which still uses xft and fontconfig.
Fontconfig and xft are ugly and require too much internal knowledge to be
-useful. The next logical layer in Linux evolved as pango and cairo. Both of
-course added HTML formatting and vector drawing. This is not needed to simply
-draw some text somewhere. And this is what a suckless font rendering library
+useful. The next logical layer evolved as pango and cairo. Both ofcourse
+added HTML formatting and vector drawing. This is not needed to simply draw
+some text somewhere. And this is what a suckless font rendering library
should do: Give it a font string and render at some position the given font
without having to care about font specifics.
[Some work](
https://git.ekleog.org/dtext) has already been done to replace
libXft and Fontconfig. Real-world testing is however still needed.
-***Requirements:*** C knowledge, some X11 knowledge and of course knowledge
+***Requirements:*** C knowledge, some X11 knowledge and ofcourse knowledge
about the font formats and how to handle them.
### Write ld wrapper or replacement for static linking
_AT_@ -59,7 +50,7 @@ statically linked libraries or executables. Also they are
extremely slow and bloated.
The [stali](
http://sta.li/) build system is not using autotools for good
-reason, however many Unix/Linux open source packages do. To create statically
+reason, however many UNIX/Linux open source packages do. To create statically
linked libraries out of the ld arguments we need an ld wrapper or
re-implementation that creates static libraries or executables. This would
enable us to build static libraries and executables out of any automake
_AT_@ -70,21 +61,8 @@ The ld wrapper needs to be extended to also link against uclibc first and if
that fails to fallback to glibc, in order to produce smaller executables in the
general case.
-***Requirements:*** Good C/Unix knowledge is essential, knowledge about linking/linker internals are desirable..
-
-### Write a decent bug and issue tracking system
-
-We a need a decent ticket management system, as this is a common task in
-today's daily activity in business and private time management. This task
-includes the design and implementation of a suckless system that solves the
-problems of TTS (Trouble Ticket System), ARS (Action Request System) and IRS
-(Incident Response System) all together. It also must be usable as a bug
-tracking system.
-
-For now suckless is using a mailinglist which fits all needs. Beware when you
-find the new and innovative way to report bugs that this is reality.
-
-***Requirements:*** Good C/Shell/web technology/HTML knowledge would be desirable, knowledge of bug tracking and issue tracking in practice is essential.
+***Requirements:*** Good C/UNIX knowledge is essential, knowledge about
+linking/linker internals are desirable.
### Write a decent mailing list Web archive system
_AT_@ -93,7 +71,7 @@ drawbacks and are quite out-dated. This task requires to write a completely new
web mailing list archiving tool that follows the thread view concepts found in
the mutt MUA and which is designed with low footprint and efficiency in mind.
-We expect this tool as a stand-alone Unix tool written in C or shell. To get
+We expect this tool as a stand-alone UNIX tool written in C or shell. To get
started you could use [Dovecot](
http://dovecot.org/) to produce a sanitized
structure:
_AT_@ -132,6 +110,7 @@ for how easy it is to write a `menu`, which can be seen as a directory.
* [gopherproject.org](
http://www.gopherproject.org)
* [gopher proxy](
http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/)
* [Gopher wikipedia article](
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29)
+* [geomyidae](
http://git.r-36.net/geomyidae/)
Anyone creating a gopher interface to suckless.org will get a bonus.
_AT_@ -141,11 +120,12 @@ daemon is required. Everyone can do this.
### A sane backend for surf
There is dillo, netsurf and abaco which implement HTML. The problem is
-Javascript and extension to replace webkit as the big dependency hell for web
+Javascript and extensions to replace webkit as the big dependency hell for web
rendering in surf.
-If you prepare to work on this project, plan ahead in recruting more
+If you prepare to work on this project, plan ahead in recruiting more
developers. You will need them.
***Requirements:*** Very good C knowledge, a very good knowledge in web
standards and how to strip them down to the suckless level.
+***Difficulty level:*** Probably impossible.
Received on Sat Nov 11 2017 - 17:09:30 CET