Need suggestion to choose a GSoC idea

Mon Mar 26 22:29:01 CDT 2012

Hi all,

I'm a student in Department of Mathematics, Sun Yat-sen University. My irc
nick name is fracting, my real name is Qian Hong. I'm in GMT+8 time zone,
availible on 10:00 to 18:00 (GMT+8) on #winehackers.

I know C/bash and some Linux skills. Currently I'm an intern in Redhat, working
in the kernel-qe group.

I have great interesting in the Wine project. Last year I spent most of my
spare time on reporting bugs to Wine. When I doing this I found lots of bugs
regarding Chinese software have beem complained in local Linux forum for years
but no one reported them to Wine project. In other words, I found most Chinese
Linux users didn't report bugs to open source projects, well, I think that is
a bug too :) After reported 100+ bugs, I'm surprised so many bugs have been
fixed in just one year.

I wish I can do some more then reporting bugs for Wine project, great if I can
get start with the 2012 GSoC and keep submitting patches to Wine after that. I
have lots of ideas in my TODO list, unfortunately most of them might too hard
to do as a GSoC project. Anyway, I'll post my ideas here, wait for feedbacks,
choose one of them as my GSoC idea, and leave others as my job in the coming
years. Certainly I'm glad to see any others working on those ideas :)

Here is my list:

- Implement ndis.sys

This idea come from the off-standard network authentication in China.

Lots of Universities in China using some off-standard network authentication
methods for campus network connection, the authentication protocols are
usually private and changed frequently, the authentication clients are usually
Windows-only.

This issue is the main blocker for students in those Universities to change to
Linux desktop or Mac. I've filed some bugs regarding some network
authentication clients, such as [1],[2],[3],[4],[5].  However, even the above
bugs are fixed, these clients might not work on wine because they depends on
ndis.sys which is not implemented yet.

As an intern in Redhat network-qe group focus on NIC testing, I have great
interesting in implement ndis.sys, though I think it is too hard for a GSoC
project.

The ndiswrapper code is a great resource but not complete, also I known
ReactOS project has a ndis.sys too but obviously it won't work on Wine.

Is it allowed to read ReactOS implementation to learn how things work?  Anyway
I'm interesting in what you think :)

- Implement/improve wpcap proxy

This idea is similar with the first one, in fact André H has already done the
most important part [6],[7]. I hope André's patch will be accepted, and I'm
interesting in improving it. I have done some proof-of-concept to show that
some kinds of network auth client wich depends on winpcap will work on wine
with André's patch.

- Improve builtin iexplore

This idea is come from another main blocker for using Linux/Mac in China.
Most Chinese online banks are ie-only, depends on ActiveX and some ie-only
style JavaScript or even VBScript.

Jacek and other wine developers has done lots of work on them, and I'm
interesting in participating.

I've filed 40+ bugs regarding online bank support with Wine [8]. My goal is to
make wine builtin iexplore works for as many online banks, currently I have
more then 6 different online bank accounts for testing, guys in
openbank-discuss group [9] will help on testing too.

- Improve USB support

Yeah, this might be another idea which is too hard for a GSoC project. We
already have a third party patch, I wonder will Wine-1.6 have official USB
support?

This idea is similar with the above one, my goal is to solve the online bank
USB-key issues. After testing on 8 different USB-keys with the USB patch [10],
I noticed they won't work on wine without hidusb.sys.  ReactOS project has
implement hidusb.sys in the last few months, again, is it allow to learn
ReactOS code if I would like to contribute to Wine?

- Improve Wine CJK font support

The main idea is fix Bug 16325 [11], Aric and others have done a lot of work
on it, and I'm glad to participating too. I think the main blocker for Wine
CJK font support is Font Association now, is it suitable for a GSoC project?
Also I've filed some other Wine font bugs [12],[13],[14],[15],[16], I'm happy
to working on them.

- Improve Wine font test case

This idea is similar with the above one, however, instead of fixing real bugs,
this idea is to prevent new bugs(regression). As having filed 100+ bugs I know
the pain of doing regression test if we can't script the test, this happens on
font related bugs.

The main idea is to integrate an OCR engine to wine testcase, use ORC method
to detect whether the fonts display correctly. We already have very good open
source ORC engine [17] which is in Apache License.  However tesseract-ocr is
written in C++ an I am worring that will not be integrated to Wine code tree.

- Improve Wine App install / App running testing

This idea is similar with Austin's early work [18], my idea is using sikuli
[19] instead of autohotkey, since sikuli is more powerful for complex work.
Sikuli using tesseract as orc engine, so if we done this job we can prevent
many font relate regression as well.

- I'm also open to other ideas...

I'm sorry for my long post, and thank you for your time to read it.  In fact I
have much more things on my todo list regarding to Wine, but time is limit and
I have to give up most of them in the near future.

I'm happy to know whether there is anyone working on these ideas, also I'm
happy if any others take them as GSoC project :) Rather than to be accepted by
GSoC, I'm more glad to see Wine is improved, especially on parts I've
mentioned above, that is why I post this long mail. Wish we can see them in
Wine 1.6. Of cause, GSoC is awesome to me :)

Any suggestion is appreciated, and feel free to ping me on IRC (fracting).

Last but not least, thanks wine community for such a great project.

Reference:
[1] Bug 29460 - Ruijie Supplicant Su1xDriver.sys crashes in driver entry due
to ntoskrnl.exe IoGetCurrentProcess() being a stub
[2] Bug 27060 - installation of iNodeSetup3.60-6208.exe needs netcfgx.dll
[3] Bug 27061 - iNode Client exit silently on start up
[4] Bug 30041 - npptools.dll is needed by ishare_user.exe of Dr.com
[5] Bug 30208 - NKSetup (Shan Xun 802.1x client) infinite loop while
installing
[6] Bug 21571 - WinPcap 4.0.1: Setup cannot install Microsoft Network Monitor
Driver (NetMon)
[7] http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2011-March/099838.html
[8] http://code.google.com/p/online-banking-with-wine/wiki/buglist
[9] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/non-ie-online-banking
[10] http://wiki.winehq.org/USB
[11] Bug 16325 - incorrect font rendering for CJK programs
[12] Bug 29851 - Some part of PDFCreator installer cannot display Chinese
correctly even Font Replacement is setting correctly
[13] Bug 29853 - QQ2011 does not display Chinese correctly with builtin usp10
if font link setting is incomplete
[14] Bug 29850 - Scilab does not display Chinese
[15] Bug 27285 - Miro does not display Chinese
[16] Bug 30263 - builtin iexplore does not display Chinese
[17] http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
[18] http://wiki.winehq.org/Appinstall
[19] http://sikuli.org/

-- Regards,
Qian Hong
-
Sent from Ubuntu
http://www.ubuntu.com/