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+[[!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.