Tue 2008/Mar/25

• Projects for Summer of Code 2008

  This year I will mentor at most two of the following four projects:

  Making evolution-data-server's calendar smaller and faster (for GNOME). E-d-s was written in the very early days of Evolution, and it needs some profiling love. In this project you will profile the calendar part of e-d-s to make it use less memory, and be faster as well with an optimized query engine.

  Reducing memory fragmentation in GNOME (for GNOME). The GNOME platform libraries do many allocations of small objects. Your task will be to do an analysis of memory fragmentation, similar to what was done for Firefox 3.

  Making removable hard drives Just Work(tm) (for openSUSE). Currently, when you plug in a blank hard drive through USB, nothing happens. The device node gets created in /dev/sdb or whatever, but you don't see anything happen in your screen. Your task will be to improve things around HAL, PolicyKit, and gnome-volume-manager to detect this situation, and to make the right thing happen.

  Reliable unmounting of removable media (for openSUSE). When you want to unmount or eject a removable volume that is being used, you get a meaningless error message. There is no way to know which programs are still using the volume. Your task will be to make GNOME tell you which processes are using the volume, and give you a chance of killing them.

  If you are a student, please see GNOME's very nice page on information for students. This will be useful to you even if you choose one of the projects for openSUSE. Don't miss out on this great opportunity to become a well-recognized member of the free software community and win USD 4500!

Syndicated 2008-03-25 12:30:00 from Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log