[OLPC-GSoC] Still need a project idea? Consider working on Develop.

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

I realize that it is late in the application week, and many people have
already made proposals (including me). However, as the person working on
Develop, I wanted to share some needs that it has, which I think would make
fun and useful projects:

- collaboration - this could be real-time collab (activity sharing), offline
collaboratin (improved versioning, and merging), or, ideally, both. Skills:
networking. Difficulty: medium/hard, depending on scope.

- debugging: create a design for running an activity within develop. This
would probably mean loading and using sugar code to give the subactivity its
own pid.  That means that you would be doing around half of the work in
Sugar and the other half in Develop. The debugger itself would be an
existing open-source component, and, to keep the project to a reasonable
size, the only UI offered would be very basic - probably shell-based.
Difficulty: hard

- testing: automated testing of activities would be important to the Sugar
platform, as mentioned in other threads. Create "gremlins" which send random
UI events to an activity, restart the same activity whenever it closes, and
have various logging options (log the events, stack; halt on warnings,
unhandled exceptions, or never; etc.) Difficulty: extremely hard to do in
the ideal way, because it basically presupposes the debugger work, but
massively massively useful. Perhaps possible to do as a separate
(non-develop) project in a slightly easier way.

- Coding goodies: auto-completion, docstring-based tooltips, zoom to file
(for class definitions and/or from debug logs), pylint integration, class
browser, etc., etc. Difficulty: easy to hard, depending on level of
ambition.

- Gui designer: either revive Gazpacho in Sugar, or port Glade. Skills: UI
design. Difficulty: honestly, I am unclear about whether python subclasses
of GTK widgets can be referenced in Glade's XML files. If so, medium
difficulty; if not, hard.

- Also, for creating icons, you should check out Inkscape, another GSoC
project, which has the proposal of "make a kids version" - you could apply
there and do it in sugar...

My own proposal, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bityi/GSoC#A_manifesto_answer, is
for code l10n (editing Python in Spanish or ??? instead of English), so I
would be working with Develop too. I would be happy to share that code with
another student (good practice using Git for real project management - if
you're doing the collaboration functions, we might even get a chance to
dogfood!), and answer questions about the Develop codebase, though as a GSoC
student, I am not eligible to be a mentor.

I'd be happy to answer any questions on this list.

Jameson
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