gsoc: new idea: fixing testsuite failures

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+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2010 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="Fix Compatibility Problems Exposed by Testsuites"]]
+
+A number of software packages come with extensive testsuites.
+Some notable ones are Perl, Python, GNU Coreutils, and glib.
+While these testsuites were written mostly to track regressions in the respective packages,
+some of the tests fail on the Hurd in general.
+
+While in some cases these might point to wrong usage of system interfaces,
+most of the time such failures are actually caused by shortcomings in Hurd's implementation of these interfaces.
+These shortcomings are often not obvious in normal use,
+but can be directly or indirectly responsible for all kinds of failures.
+The testsuites help in isolating such problems,
+so they can be tracked down and fixed.
+
+This task thus consists in running some of the mentioned testsuites
+(and/or any other ones that come to mind),
+and looking into the causes of failures.
+The goal is to analyze all failures in one or more of the listed testsuites,
+to find out what shortcomings in the Hurd implementation cause them (if any),
+and to fix at least some of these shortcomings.
+
+Note that this task somewhat overlaps with the [[Perl/Python task|perl_python]] listed above.
+Here the focus however is not on improving the support for any particular program,
+but on fixing general problems in the Hurd.
+
+This is a very flexible task:
+while less experienced students should be able to tackle at least a few of the easier problems,
+other issues will be challenging even for experienced hackers.
+No specific previous knowledge is required for this task;
+only fairly decent C programming skills.
+While tracking down the various issues,
+the student will be digging into the inner workings of the Hurd,
+and thus gradually gaining the knowledge required for Hurd development in general.
+
+Possible mentors: Samuel Thibault (youpi)
+
+Exercise: Take a stab at one of the testsuite failures,
+and write a minimal testcase exposing the underlying problem.
+Actually fixing it would be a bonus of course --
+but as it's hard to predict which issues will be easy and which will be tricky,
+we will already be satisfied if the student makes a good effort.
+(We hope to see some discussion of the problems in this case though :-) )