gsoc/project_ideas: Restore all project ideas here

While there is certainly some overlap with other areas, it is *not*
acceptable to drop mentors and exercises from GSoC tasks, nor to add
random crap, nor do any other changes that make them less useful as GSoC
tasks -- and this is *not* obvious if they do not live in the
project_ideas namespace. It's also confusing in general.

I tried to preserve all valid changes to the task descriptions themself
-- though I might have messed up some things.

I did leave the now redundant entries in open_tasks in place. Not sure
how to deal with them. As the content is virtually identical anyways,
they probably should be just turned into stubs pointing here. Or don't
list them explicitely at all -- we point out in other places that GSoC
ideas are useful in other contexts too...

For the future, please refrain from reorganising things here without
prior discussion.

1 files changed, 45 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/procfs.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/procfs.mdwn
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+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
+
+[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled
+[[GNU Free Documentation License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+[[!meta title="procfs"]]
+
+Although there is no standard (POSIX or other) for the layout of the `/proc`
+pseudo-filesystem, it turned out a very useful facility in GNU/Linux and other
+systems, and many tools concerned with process management use it. (`ps`, `top`,
+`htop`, `gtop`, `killall`, `pkill`, ...)
+
+Instead of porting all these tools to use [[hurd/libps]] (Hurd's official method for
+accessing process information), they could be made to run out of the box, by
+implementing a Linux-compatible `/proc` filesystem for the Hurd.
+
+The goal is to implement all `/proc` functionality needed for the various process
+management tools to work.  (On Linux, the `/proc` filesystem is used also for
+debugging purposes; but this is highly system-specific anyways, so there is
+probably no point in trying to duplicate this functionality as well...)
+
+The [[existing_partially_working_procfs_implementation|hurd/translator/procfs]]
+can serve as a starting point, but needs to be largely rewritten.  (It should
+use [[hurd/libnetfs]] rather than [[hurd/libtrivfs]]; the data format needs to
+change to be more Linux-compatible; and it needs adaptation to newer system
+interfaces.)
+
+This project requires learning [[hurd/translator]] programming, and
+understanding some of the internals of process management in the Hurd.  It
+should not be too hard coding-wise; and the task is very nicely defined by the
+existing Linux `/proc` interface -- no design considerations necessary.
+
+**Note**: We already have several applications for this task.
+
+Possible mentors: Olaf Buddenhagen (antrik)
+
+Exercise: Add or fix one piece in the existing procfs translator.
+
+*Status*: Madhusudan.C.S has implemented a new, fully functional [[procfs|madhusudancs]] for
+GSoC 2008. He is still working on some outstanding issues.