New GSoC task: libcap

2 files changed, 38 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn
index b318b377..024deca4 100644
--- a/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn
+++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn
@@ -103,3 +103,4 @@ See also the list of [Hurd-related X.org project ideas](http://wiki.x.org/wiki/H
 [[inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/hardware_libs" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
 [[inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/cdparanoia" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
 [[inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/perl" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
+[[inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap.mdwn
new file mode 100644
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+++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap.mdwn
@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+[[meta copyright="Copyright © 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="Implementing libcap"]]
+
+libcap is a library providing the API to access POSIX capabilities. These allow
+giving various kinds of specific privileges to individual users, without giving
+them full root permissions.
+
+Although the Hurd design should faciliate implementing such features in a quite
+natural fashion, there is no support for POSIX capabilities yet. As a
+consequence, libcap is not available on the Hurd, and thus various packages
+using it can not be easily built in Debian GNU/Hurd.
+
+The first goal of this project is implementing a dummy libcap, which doesn't
+actually do anything useful yet, but returns appropriate status messages, so
+program using the library can be built and run on Debian GNU/Hurd.
+
+Having this, actual support for at least some of the capabilities should be
+implemented, as time permits. This will require some digging into Hurd
+internals.
+
+Some knowledge of POSIX capabilities will need to be obtained, and for the
+latter part also some knowledge about the Hurd architecture. This project is
+probably doable without previous experience with either, though.
+
+Possible mentors:
+
+Exercise: Make libcap compile on Debian GNU/Hurd. It doesn't need to actually
+do anything yet -- just make it build at all for now.