Google SoC Proposal Ideas

[cberardi%natoufa.com@localhost]

Hello,

I am hopeful to participate with NetBSD in Google's 2009 Summer of Code. I have 
a short list of potential projects and was hoping to bounce some ideas off of 
you here to find out the feasibility and hone in on a final selection.

A short background of my education and skills: I am a senior computer science 
student at Youngstown State University. I have a good background in Unix and C 
programming (along with several other languages). I have been using NetBSD for 
about 3 years and it has been my primary OS for over 6 months - I'm currently 
running 5.0_RC2.  

One of my goals is besides having the oppurtunity to work with the NetBSD 
program is to be exposed to new techniques and technologies I haven't seen yet.


My own idea is to reimplement a GNU/GPL utility under a BSD license, like grep 
or diff/diff3. 

The others come from the project list from the NetBSD site. One of them was to 
rewrite the lpr/lpd for better features and support of modern printers and 
printing protocols. The first question I have unanswered is where exactly I 
would find the information on said protocols?

Another good looking idea is the file resizer utility. Both the utility and the 
project look interesting. It does call for a regression test suite, but I've 
never developed anyting more than simple tests for my programs and don't know 
how involved that would be. 

Two other ideas that were on the list that were interesting was integrating 
plan9 wide-character regular expressions into libc and improving the ext2 root 
filesystem support.


Any ideas or anything I should be looking at or for? Feedback would be 
appreciated.

-- 
Christopher Berardi
http://www.natoufa.com/

Be still, and know that I am God (Psalms 46:10)