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Diffstat (limited to 'community/gsoc/project_ideas')
| -rw-r--r-- | community/gsoc/project_ideas/hardware_libs.mdwn | 41 |
1 files changed, 41 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/hardware_libs.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/hardware_libs.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e3680378 --- /dev/null +++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/hardware_libs.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +[[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="Stub Implementations of Hardware Specific Libraries"]] + +Many programs use special libraries to access certain hardware devices, like +libusb, libbluetooth, libraw1394 etc. + +The Hurd presently doesn't support these devices. Nevertheless, all of these +programs could still be built -- and most of them would indeed be useful -- +without actual support of these hardware devices. However, as the libraries are +presently not available for Hurd, the programs can't be easily built in Debian +GNU/Hurd due to missing dependencies. + +This could be avoided by providing dummy libraries, which the programs could +link against, but which wouldn't actually do any hardware access: instead, they +would simply return appropriate error codes, reporting that no devices were +found. + +There are two possible approaches for providing such stub libraries: Either +implement replacement libraries providing the same API as the real ones; or +implement dummy backends for the Hurd in the proper libraries. Which approach +to prefer probably depends on the structure of the various libraries. + +The goal of this project is to create working dummy libraries/backends for the +mentioned devices, and get them into Debian GNU/Hurd. It shouldn't require any +special previous knowledge, though some experience with build systems would be +helpful. Finishing this task will probably require learning a bit about the +hardware devices in question, and about Debian packaging. + +Possible mentors: + +Exercise: Get one of the libraries to compile on Debian GNU/Hurd. It doesn't +need to report reasonable error codes yet -- just make it build at all for now. |