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| -rw-r--r-- | community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn | 1 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap.mdwn | 37 |
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 index 00000000..b65ee13c --- /dev/null +++ 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. |