Ideas: Google Summer of Code 2012

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): Dan Winship

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

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, Matt Wagner as co-mentor

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.

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): Dennis Gilmore

Notes: webhosting control panel draft

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:

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:

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.

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: -

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: -

Status: Proposed

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

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.

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:

Knowledge prerequisite: Ruby on Rails, web development, some UI design chops

Skill level: Intermediate

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.

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: jkeating [AT]redhat [DOT] com

Mentor(s): User:jkeating - Mentor

Notes: This project is in python.

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 Back-up Mentor : Buddhika Kurera

Notes: -

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): Peter Tibor Borsa, María "tatica" and Back-up Mentor : Buddhika Kurera

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.

Status: Proposed

This integration should facilitate Fedora ambassadors to organize their events easily and at the same time should be compatible with the Insight calender. Please refer to Insight use cases for events.

Knowledge prerequisite: Knowledge on Drupal would be essential. PHP and MySQL

Skill level: Medium

Mentor(s): Buddhika Kurera, Peter Tibor Borsa

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, Matt Wagner as co-mentor

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

Status: Proposed

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 (general), Vít Ondruch (packaging)

Mentor(s): Ranjib Dey (tentative), Seth Vidal (tentative), Dmitriy Zaporozhets (dzaporozhets), Ariejan de Vroom (ariejan)

Notes: This idea is definitely something the Fedora project is interested in pursuing. The work in this project will be carried on after the project, and is an opportunity for a longer-term involvement in Fedora.

See the discussion on the Fedora Infrastructure list about implementation details: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/infrastructure/2012-March/011463.html

A demo of Gitlab can be found here: http://gitlabhq.com/demo.html

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.

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: The idea behind this project is to make the Fedora Weekly News composing less cumbersome and semi-automated.

Knowledge prerequisite: PHP, Python, Parsing, XML

Skill level: Intermediate

Mentor(s): Buddhike Kurera

Notes: Contact the mentor if anyone is interested.

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).

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:

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.

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 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

Status: Proposed

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. Tasks may include (but not limited to):

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 and Christopher Antila

Status: Proposed

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.

Another critical component is the interoperability with Eclipse. It’s important that a setup for Eclipse gets augmented for a developer to install/implement the JBoss specific tools and plugins. A decision needs to be done, whether updates of Eclipse should be done via RPMs or via a Eclipse repository. JBossAS7 is targeting a maven repository setup - one option could simply be to tie into this repository.

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, Peter Larsen

Mentor(s): Marek Goldmann, Carlo de Wolf

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

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

Mentor(s): Heiko Rupp

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

Status: Proposed

Summary of idea: Fedora Easy Karma is a CLI application to help testers apply karma to installed updates and while it’s great at doing so, it doesn’t display much other information on what an update is supposed to fix or what can be done to test a particular update. A GUI tool that pulls in more information on packages under test would help in the testing process and hopefully help encourage less techical users to start testing packages.

Knowledge prerequisite: GUI tool kit (Qt or GTK), python

Skill level: intermediate

Contacts: Tim Flink (tflink)

Mentor(s): Tim Flink (tflink)

Notes: A longer description and some rough mockups can be found here

Status: Proposed (Student Idea)

Summary of idea: During the testing of Fedora releases, test images are often useful as smoke tests before full TC/RC composes, as baselines for specific test days or for automated installation testing in AutoQA. The idea is to make an on-demand Web-based build service (similar to Open Suse Build Service and Slax) which users/developers can use to make custom Fedora based distributions. The service would be capable of building and hosting images (boot iso, installation DVDs and live images) made up of builds from stable repositories in addition to side repos containing specific builds from both updates-testing and koji builds that have yet to be pushed to any repos. The service should also also have a RESTful API (or similar).

Knowledge prerequisite: Python, Fedora repositories

Knowledge nice-to-have: Fedora image building, testing, Celery

Skill level: intermediate to advanced

Contacts: Amit Saha

Mentor(s): Tim Flink (tflink)

Notes: Looking for co-mentors, will update this idea if any are found