Feasible google summer of code project?

[Mike Hearn]

On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 19:26:07 +0000, Joseph Garvin wrote:
> 1. My understanding is the mentor organizations get to choose who they
> want. Is the wine project still interested in someone with my relatively
> low C/wine code base experience or should I just look elsewhere?

Well, we're not the borg but yes we're interested in anybody who seems
competent and dedicated. Based on a totally random and mostly
unjustified first impression, I'd say you are!
 
> 2. Is this something feasible for a proposal? Could it realistically be
> completed over the summer, say with 10 (insert your realistic number
> here) hours a week of work? You guys know the code better than I do :)

You named a lot of stuff there, but yes desktop integration is absolutely
pitched at about the right level. If it helps any, when I started I didn't
even know C, I learned it specifically in order to hack on Wine. So it's
definitely do-able, especially as documentation improved a lot since I
started (well, I would say that, I wrote quite a bit ... :)

In order of difficulty from easy to hard I'd say:

- Linking Desktop/My Documents to the real locations
- XDG menu support
- Autorun (needs the Wine explorer work really)
- Icon themes

Icon themes listed as "quite hard" because directly importing icon themes
from the environment is fraught with non-code problems like visual
consistency. I have a patch to import the GNOME artwork which IMHO makes a
*ton* of difference, it looks much nicer, but Alexandre wants yellow
folders ;) But to do that I had to Gimp the icons up a bit, they weren't
usable raw.

Autorun needs integration with the HAL to monitor for new media events,
really. And that needs a process sitting in the background, which is what
the Wine Explorer thing is supposed to be. I have a patch to add that but
AJ said at WineConf it needed more design work.

XDG menu support is totally do-able, though be prepared for frustration as
you hit random bugs in desktops and distros even if you only target XDG.

Linking Desktop/My Documents to the real locations shouldn't be too hard
... in theory ....

thanks -mike