index.md (5935B)
1 Project ideas 2 ============= 3 Please read our [philosophy](/philosophy) for background information. 4 5 Peer review 6 ----------- 7 The suckless.org community will act as a rigid reviewer of the progress. 8 9 General ideas 10 ------------- 11 Our project ideas in general intend to focus on our innovative development 12 environment from bare hardware to the graphical interface. 13 14 * Idiomatic interfaces for developers (such as more advanced concepts for mail 15 clients, messaging clients, music players, text editors). 16 * Simple protocol interfaces for developers. 17 * General userland enhancements to UNIX-like operating systems. 18 * Foundations of a new windowing system for UNIX-like operating systems. 19 * Improvements to our existing software projects and infrastructure. 20 * Replacements of bloated existing software and libraries in a suckless way. 21 22 23 Current small tasks 24 ------------------- 25 * Write a gopher back-end using build-page.c: 26 <https://git.suckless.org/sites/file/build-page.c.html> 27 This should use the geomyidae gopher server and the gph output format. 28 Difficulty: medium-rare. 29 * Fix broken patches on the wiki. Difficulty: trivial-medium. 30 See: <https://gunther.suckless.org/patches/> 31 * Fix broken links on the wiki. Difficulty: trivial. 32 See: <https://git.suckless.org/sites/file/checklinks.sh.html> 33 * Fix typos and formatting errors on the wiki. Difficulty: trivial. 34 35 36 Concrete ideas 37 -------------- 38 The listed ideas generally require good knowledge of C and experience with 39 UNIX-like operating systems. The difficulty ranges from medium to high. 40 41 42 ### Suckless font rendering library 43 44 There is libdrw in suckless now, which still uses xft and fontconfig. 45 Fontconfig and xft are ugly and require too much internal knowledge to be 46 useful. The next logical layer evolved as pango and cairo. Both of course added 47 HTML formatting and vector drawing. This is not needed to simply draw some text 48 somewhere. And this is what a suckless font rendering library should do: Give 49 it a font string and render at some position the given font without having to 50 care about font specifics. 51 52 ***Requirements:*** C knowledge, some X11 knowledge and of course knowledge 53 about the font formats and how to handle them. 54 55 56 ### Write ld wrapper or replacement for static linking 57 58 The GNU autotools such as automake and autoconf are completely unusable in 59 non-chroot'ed cross-compile environments and often completely fail to produce 60 statically linked libraries or executables. Also they are extremely slow and 61 bloated. 62 63 The stali build system is not using autotools for good reason, however many 64 UNIX/Linux open source packages do. To create statically linked libraries out 65 of the ld arguments we need an ld wrapper or re-implementation that creates 66 static libraries or executables. This would enable us to build static libraries 67 and executables out of any automake generated makefiles without the need to 68 write make replacements or patching the build system of a particular package. 69 70 The ld wrapper needs to be extended to also link against uclibc first and if 71 that fails to fallback to glibc, in order to produce smaller executables in the 72 general case. 73 74 ***Requirements:*** Good C/UNIX knowledge is essential, knowledge about 75 linking/linker internals are desirable. 76 77 78 ### Write a decent mailing list Web archive system 79 80 All web archive systems such as hypermail, pipermail, etc. have plenty 81 drawbacks and are quite out-dated. This task requires to write a completely new 82 web mailing list archiving tool that follows the thread view concepts found in 83 the mutt MUA and which is designed with low footprint and efficiency in mind. 84 85 We expect this tool as a stand-alone UNIX tool written in C or shell. To get 86 started you could use [Dovecot](http://dovecot.org/) to produce a sanitized 87 structure: 88 89 printf "1 select inbox\n2 thread references us-ascii all\n3 fetch 1:* 90 envelope\n4 logout\n" | 91 /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap 2>/dev/null 92 93 * <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html> 94 95 ***Requirements:*** Good C/Shell/HTML knowledge would be desirable. Must not 96 use JavaScript. 97 98 99 ### Write cookie handler for surf 100 101 The biggest disadvantage of [surf](//surf.suckless.org) is sloppy cookie 102 handling. libwebkit and libsoup (which are used for HTTP) were never designed 103 to run in multiple processes simultaneously. 104 105 This task requires writing a new cookie handler in surf which: 106 107 * creates a nice human-readable cookie file 108 * is able to run in multiple concurrent processes 109 110 ***Requirements:*** Good knowledge of C and POSIX file locking. Basic knowledge 111 of GTK and its other evil friends. 112 113 114 ### Gopher services 115 116 Gopher is a sane protocol which has hierarchy in its design. It allows the 117 abstraction of a mass of information in a filesystem. The goal of this meta 118 project is to find ideas how to implement gopher services to easily access the 119 web and new information. 120 121 See the 122 [protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29#Protocol) for 123 how easy it is to write a `menu`, which can be seen as a directory. 124 125 * [gopherproject.org](http://www.gopherproject.org) 126 * [gopher proxy](http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/) 127 * [Gopher wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29) 128 * [geomyidae](http://git.r-36.net/geomyidae/) 129 130 Anyone creating a gopher interface to suckless.org will get a bonus. 131 132 ***Requirements:*** Just some shell scripting and a way to setup a gopher 133 daemon is required. Everyone can do this. 134 135 136 ### A sane backend for surf 137 138 There is dillo, netsurf and abaco which implement HTML. The problem is 139 JavaScript and extensions to replace webkit as the big dependency hell for web 140 rendering in surf. 141 142 If you prepare to work on this project, plan ahead in recruiting more 143 developers. You will need them. 144 145 ***Requirements:*** Very good C knowledge, a very good knowledge in web 146 standards and how to strip them down to the suckless level. ***Difficulty 147 level:*** Probably impossible.