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+[[!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="Use Internet Protocol Translators (ftpfs etc.) as Backends for Other Programs"]]
+
+The Hurd design facilitates splitting up large applications into independent,
+generic components, which can be easily combined in different contexts, by
+moving common functionality into separate Hurd servers (translators),
+accessible trough filesystem interfaces and/or specialized RPC interfaces.
+
+Download protocols like FTP, HTTP, BitTorrent etc. are very good candidates for
+this kind of modularization: a program could simply use the download
+functionality by accessing FTP, HTTP etc. translators.
+
+There is already an ftpfs translator in the Hurd tree, as well as an [httpfs
+translator on hurdextras](http://www.nongnu.org/hurdextras/#httpfs); however,
+these are only suitable for very simple use cases: they just provide the actual
+file contents downloaded from the URL, but no additional status information
+that are necessary for interactive use. (Progress indication, error codes, HTTP
+redirects etc.)
+
+A new interface providing all this additional information (either as an
+extension to the existing translators, or as distinct translators) is required
+to make such translators usable as backends for programs like apt-get for
+example.
+
+The goal of this project is to design a suitable interface, implement it for at
+least one download protocol, and adapt apt-get (or some other program) to use
+this as a backend.
+
+This task requires some design skills and some knowledge of internet protocols,
+to create a suitable interface. Translator programming knowledge will have to
+be obtained while implementing it.
+
+It is not an easy task, but it shouldn't pose any really hard problems either.
+
+Possible mentors: Olaf Buddenhagen (antrik)
+
+Exercise: Make some improvement to one of the existing download translators --
+httpfs in particular is known to be buggy.