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Diffstat (limited to 'community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap.mdwn')
-rw-r--r-- | community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap.mdwn | 41 |
1 files changed, 41 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 00000000..18c49c48 --- /dev/null +++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/libcap.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2009, 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="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 facilitate 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. + +David Hedberg applied for this project in 2010, +and though he didn't go through with it, +he fleshed out many [[details]]. + +Possible mentors: Samuel Thibault (youpi) + +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. |