GSoC -- Possible projects

[Aurélien Aptel]

Hi!

I'm a french student doing a CS degree in Lyon and I'm interested in
working on Samba for this year Google Summer of Code. I understand I
may have to work on several projects in order to fill the summer.
I'll be honest: up until now I was a simple samba user and I don't
know much about the underlying code so please stop and correct me if I
say inane things :)

Here are the projects I'm interested in:

- Improve smbclient archive support

The goal of this project is to replace smbclient own limited tar
implementation with a separate library (libarchive). This would fix
several bugs, provide multiple archive/compression formats and maybe
improve performances.
I guess the CLI should also be changed to provide a way to choose
between formats.

- improve regedit

I was a bit surprised to see that regedit is implemented in C. I
thought this kind of non time-critical software would be a lot simpler
to write in some scripting language, especially since Samba seems to
have Python bindings. I'm interested in improving by rewriting it in
Python, if that's possible. I know this sounds like a NIH syndrome but
I think C is not the right tool here.
I was also half-jokingly thinking at an Emacs mode, but maybe that's
too far fetched... :)

- Create GUI or command-line tools for displaying /proc/fs/cifs
statistics and and mount/session status

I was thinking about a simple script that outputs a pretty html/css
file. This should be a small task.

As for the credentials, I feel comfortable programming in C which I've
been doing for 5+ years. I've also worked on and contributed to
several projects including:
- st [http://st.suckless.org] a tiny xterm replacement
- GNU Emacs: few patches to the C core
- Org-mode (Emacs Lisp) in last year GSoC

I sometime post things I do on Bitbucket
[https://bitbucket.org/knarf/] when I find them useful/interesting
enough.
I guess that's all, let me know what you think.