Community:SummerOfCode08:Brainstorming

Projects with a confirmed mentor and approved by the Mozilla project SoC administrator will be moved to Community:SummerOfCode08. Potential students should look at that page to find project ideas for which we'd like submissions.

Ground Rules

• Be specific. It's hard to understand the impact of, or the size of, vague proposals.
• Consider size. The student has eight weeks to design, code, test and document the proposal. It needs to fill, but not overfill, that time.
• Do your research. Support the idea with well-researched links.
• Don't morph other people's ideas. If you have a related idea, place it next to the existing one, or add a comment.
• Insert only your own name into the Mentor column, and then only if you are willing to take on the responsibility. Potential mentors sign up here.

(More thoughts on making a good list)

Suggestion List

Last year's ideas: Confirmed, Brainstorming

Mozilla Platform

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments
9P/Styx	Add generic support for 9P/Styx filesystem, so other components can access 9P servers (eg. as storage backend or just IPC) and provide 9P-based interfaces to other applications. This will also obsolete the (currently unused and unmaintained?) IPC component. Should use libmixp, libmixpsrv and libmvfs, which are near to stable release.	metux		metux: what benefits does this bring to users? Three libraries sounds like a significant increase in codesize. Are you suggesting a core feature or an extension? -- Gerv. ... @Gerv: these libs are quite small (I'll even trimm them further down)
Profile data via Styx	Let the access to certain profile data (eg. bookmarks, cookies, secrets-db) via synthethic filesystems	metux
NPAPI Test suite	bug 105959 - Write a comprehensive testsuite plugin for the NPAPI implementation of the browser		bsmedberg
Package Dehydra for General Use	Create an automated build system for Dehydra_GCC: create a buildbot setup which builds and packages GCC and dehydra on Linux and mac.		bsmedberg

Firefox/Gecko

Please use this format for submitting ideas.

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments
Extension: Remote Cookie Storage	A Firefox extension that stores/retrieves cookies on a server instead of locally, allowing cross-machine cookie sharing. Includes a UI to choose which cookies to share. This is similar to Google Browser Sync, but is open-source (including server-side code so users can run their own servers if they like). Privacy-focussed.	Eric H. Jung	Eric H. Jung	How does this relate to Weave? -- Gerv.
Metalink Support	Native support for the Metalink XML format (bug 331979) which lists mirrors and checksums, along with other useful metadata such as mirror location. Listing multiple URLs for a file increases availability while the checksums guarantee integrity and let downloads be repaired automatically. You can also filter downloads by location and other things. Metalink is currently supported by most download managers including DownThemAll!	Ant Bryan
Extension : Avahi Support	Avahi is an application to discover services available on local network ( known as Zeroconf) and is currently being used by many distributions and softwares to implement the same technology. An extension and UI would be developed, so that user can access and administrate services found by Avahi daemon. Services: Avahi can detect all the hardwares capable with IPv4LL addressing and can access all the services like FTP servers, shared files available on remote machine running Avahi. Benefits to Firefox users: They can access printers , FTP servers, Web servers, SSH Remote terminal available on local network with Firefox. We can develop some kind of protocol as KDE people have for Konqueror to access Avahi services.	Sunil Ghai		Sunil: why does Firefox need to do any of those things? We don't need to manage printers, for example - and we print to them via the OS, which does all the hard work. Konqueror is not a good comparison because it does far more things in the KDE desktop than Firefox will ever do. -- Gerv @Gerv: This would make firefox capable to access Zeroconf networks. To implement Zeroconf, many distributions are using Avahi. Resources could be anything, not just a printer.
Server-Sent DOM Events	Add support for WhatWG's Server-Sent DOM Events HTML5 There is already a partial patch somewhere in bugzilla. Would have to check the status and see how much there is still to-do.	Olli Pettay 'smaug'
Display date/time dependent on user's location	Pages where a user can edit (eg.- wikis, orkut scrapbooks), usually show the time on which the edit took place according to the server. It would be nice if that date/time is displayed according to the country the user is sitting in. For example, if I edit a wiki page, or I scrap in my friends scrapbook, the date/time at which I did that would be displayed according to the respective server, not the user's machine.	Siddhant Goel
} Thunderbird Title Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc Reporter Mentor(s) Comments Maildir Support Bug 382876 Implement the possibility to store Thunderbird mails in Maildir format. Storing mails as individual files and using SQLite for the index file should increase data safety. KAMiKAZOW The bug number you give is about Calendar. Also, what to do the new Thunderbird team think of this? Reading bugs, bienvenu seemed to think that pluggable storage was the way to go. -- Gerv Calendar Title Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc Reporter Mentor(s) Comments Camino Title Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc Reporter Mentor(s) Comments SeaMonkey Title Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc Reporter Mentor(s) Comments Bugzilla Title Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc Reporter Mentor(s) Comments Integrate Bugzilla with a Wiki Many bug tracking systems have the capability to integrate with a wiki. Bugzilla doesn't. There are plenty of ways anyone could integrate these two types of systems. Bugzilla supports plug-ins as well. Some possible integrations are: Linking from the wiki directly to Bugzilla via a simple tag. Displaying a query on a wiki page, ie blockers for 3.2. Linking to a wiki page from bugzilla and showing designs for more in depth enhancements, perhaps in an iframe? Integrating project, component and other pages into the wiki might be neat. Maybe making a new component/project automatically makes a space in the wiki that shows some basic info about the state of bugs and also has places for the user to enter other info? Users in bugzilla have wiki pages that let them put more info about themselves like their IM or other stuff? This would be a super tight integration so that might want to be avoided due to annoyances in maintenance. Examples from confluence/jira (neither are foss) http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/JIRA+Issues+Macro http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Testplan+Plugins http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/JIRA+Portlet+Macro?focusedCommentId=137265353 I've got to look at other wiki/bug tracking integrations for more ideas. The list is as long as your imagination. Also including Testopia into the mix might make it interesting as well. The solution could be a generalize way of hooking bugzilla into any wiki, or a specific wiki into bugzilla. Atsushi Shimono & Guy Pyrzak Max Kanat Alexander & Guy Pyrzak How complicated do you think this is? Is it really eight weeks work? -- Gerv A Firefox Extension for Bugzilla Firefox has many useful extensions that integrate bug trackers into it. There are extensions that integrate task systems into email such as Remember The Milk(RTM). We're interested in a useful way of integrating Bugzilla with Firefox, extra props for integrating it into an email client! Yeah, this one is a bit fuzzy. See Bugxula for more ideas. Since Bugxula has not been worked on in a long time it could pick up from where it left off. It could focus more on finding and reporting bugs since it is probably the 2 main things users do without a full interface. It could also be a whole new think like the RTM extension which appears oh so cutely inside of gmail. Maybe it is an extension that works in both thunderbird and firefox! I'd kinda like to get feedback on places they would like to see this one. Guy Pyrzak Max Kanat Alexander & Guy Pyrzak You need to define better how this proposal relates to Bugxula? Would it reimplement it? Improve it? Do something different? -- Gerv Support general autolinkification for integration with Software Configuration Management systems One of the most frequently requested features in Scmbug is adding autolinkification support for Bugzilla. When a developer browses changeset comments in a Bugzilla, they would like to click on a commited file and be directed to a ViewCVS/ViewSVN application that annotates the changes. However, implementing this requires changes to Bugzilla (and bug-trackers in general, e.g. Mantis suffers from the same issue, but other bug-trackers, like JIRA don't) to enable them to transform changeset comment descriptions according to a predefined convention. Merely instructing Scmbug to produce such "autolinkified" comments is not enough, because for security reasons (cross-site scripting attacks) Bugzilla will not blindly linkify anything in a comment. Thus, special support is needed in Bugzilla to allow users to define possible log comment autolinkifications using regular expressions. Kristis Makris another mentor that ... *understands* Bugzilla is needed & Kristis Makris L10n Title Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc Reporter Mentor(s) Comments Locale strings verifier Guidelines - Nearly every extension today provides locales which ship as different languages with the extension. At the moment, where is no tool which can automatically validate the existing locales if all files and string exists. If not every string exists or the files are wrong encoded, the application will only start up with an error message and the user has to uninstall the extension in safe mode. Wanted features: Setting default locale, export of valid ones, warnings if strings equal etc. Archaeopteryx This would be a standalone tool run by the developer, and not a part of Firefox/Thunderbird, right? -- Gerv Standalone is recommended, but an extension is also possible (which "scans" the other extension) if the browser locale is valid in the extension. -- Archaeopteryx