Find an idea you like? Want to propose your own? See the student application process.

Students Welcome

If you are a student looking forward to participating in GSOC 2017 with Fedora, please feel free to browse this idea list which is still growing.

Now please go read the What Can I do Today section of the main page.

Do not hesitate to contact the mentors or contributors listed on this page for any questions or clarification. You can find helpful people on the IRC channel, or use the mailing list. can be used for getting help with programming problems.

If you are new to the Fedora Project, the following material will help you to get started. You should also follow the student application process

Supporting Mentors

The following contributors are available to provide general help and support for the GSoC 2017 program (existing contributors, feel free to add yourselves and your wiki page). If a specific project mentor is busy, you can contact one of the people below for short-term help on your project or task.

  • Brian (bex) Exelbierd (Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator, FCAIC, 🎂, containers, general development, general Linux)

  • Justin W. Flory (General development, general Linux, Fedora community, GSoC alumnus, questions about program, misc. advice)

  • Radka (rhea) Janek (C#, webserver or dotnet related stuff on Linux, general support and help with the program)

  • Corey Sheldon (Python, 2Factor/Multi-Factor Auth, QA Testing, general mentoring, security, 2nd year mentor)

  • Sachin S. Kamath (General Linux, Fedora community, Metrics, GSoC alumnus, Help with program)

  • Bhagyashree(Bee) ( Fedora community, Metrics, Python, past GSoC mentor, Support related to GSoC)

  • Lali Devamanthri (General development, Middleware/Integration, general Linux, Fedora community, GSoC alumnus, past GSoC mentor)

  • Devyani Kota (Fedora community, GSoC Alumnus, General Linux, Python, questions related to GSoC)

Draft of an idea

Please add your idea using the following template. The template contains comments in italic text, examples and questions that should be answered. Please copy the template (your idea) into the list of ideas - do not change it here.

Project Name

Status Proposed - draft Use this status.

Skill level

Novice / Intermediate / Proficient Are the required skills below something a beginner would no or could reasonably learn quickly? Is there an area where knowledge is already expected making this an advanced project? Also consider how much knowledge about Fedora is required.

Skills required

Programming languages or other skills that the student should already posess. Keep in mind that students come to both practice thieir existing skills and grow. Scope your tasks for someone to be able to apply and learn during the project, therefore you shouldn’t list everything required to complete the task.

Mentor(s)

If your SIG is taking the responsibility, specify as in this example (and always link to people or groups) DotNet SIG - Radka (rhea) Janek, …​

Contacts (IRC & email)

#example-irc-channel & [email protected] - Mentors email or mailing list of your SIG.

Idea description

Something something.

Notes & references

Something or nothing.

Idea list for GSoC 2017

389 Directory Server: developing administrative tools

Status Proposed - draft

Skill level

Intermediate

Skills required

Python: Must understand Classes, Inheritance, and Modules

Mentor(s)

William Brown (firstyear UTC+10, please be patient!)

Contacts (IRC & email)

#839 & [email protected]

Idea description

389 Directory Server is an enterprise class LDAP server, used in businesses globally to authenticate and identify people. We have a large code base that has gone through nearly 20 years of evolution.

Part of this evolution has been the recent addition of a python administration framework designed to replace our legacy perl tools. The framework already has the base classes designed and written, but we need help to knit together the high level administrative functionality.

Throughout this process you will need to:

  • Learn to deploy a 389 Directory Server.

  • Learn some of the functions of 389 DS (account policy, plugin management).

  • Read and interpret some of our existing perl and shell scripts.

  • Extend the python tools dsconf to support enabling / disabling / configuration of modules in Directory Server to replace our legacy tools.

  • Review other team members' python code.

  • Participate in our community.

From this you will learn:

  • How to integrate and use existing python frameworks and servers.

  • Techniques to unit test command line and python tools.

  • How to work with a geographically distributed team.

  • Engineering principles expected of a project with high quality demands.

  • Use of git and ticket trackers for a project.

  • How to contribute to mailing lists and the review process.

What are we looking for:

  • To teach you good community engagement, and engineering skills. The coding project is a means to help us teach you to interact effectively with a team, and to learn engineering principles.

Is this project right for you?

  • Come and talk to wibrown on #389 in irc on freenode, or email our mailing list [email protected]

Notes & references

port389.org

ASP.NET Core web application for /r/Fedora subreddit

Status Proposed - draft

Skill level

Novice

Skills required

Basic C#

Mentor(s)

DotNet SIG - Radka (rhea) Janek

Contacts (IRC & email)

#fedora-dotnet & [email protected], [email protected]

Idea description

Goals:

  • ASP.NET Core web application for our /r/Fedora subreddit to let the user choose a flair, based on their FAS Group memberships, written in C# and deployed on a Fedora production server as systemd service.

You will learn:

  • What is it .NET Core and how to use it in Linux

  • How to write C# code on Linux and what IDEs are available to you.

  • You will create and deploy an ASP.NET Core application on our Fedora production server as systemd service, with secure Apache in front of it.

Notes & references

.NET on Fedora, ipsilon ; Due to high interest we recommend that you apply for different project.

.NET Core wrapper library for systemd

Status Proposed - draft

Skill level

Intermediate

Skills required

C# and basic Linux

Mentor(s)

DotNet SIG - Radka (rhea) Janek

Contacts (IRC & email)

#fedora-dotnet & [email protected], [email protected]

Idea description

Goals:

  • .NET Standard library wrapping systemd, written in C# and published on NuGet.

  • By utilizing systemd, we can control various aspects of the system underneath directly from C# (eg. stopping or starting services, scheduling reboots)

You will learn:

  • What is it .NET Core and how to use it in Linux

  • How to write C# code on Linux and what IDEs are available to you.

  • How to create and maintain NuGet packages.

  • How to utilize systemd and dbus to control your Linux system.

Notes & references

.NET on Fedora ; Due to high interest we recommend that you apply for different project.

Continuous static analysis db

Status Proposed - draft

Skill level

Intermediate

Skills required

  • Python

  • Distributed systems

Mentor(s)

Athos Ribiero (athoscr)

Contacts (IRC & email)

IRC: athos Email: [email protected]

Idea description

This project proposes the design and implementation of a system to continuously run multiple security oriented static analyzers on source code and display the alarms related to a specific version of the analyzed software. The alarms to be presented will be ranked based on their importance, where critical flaws shall be ranked first and potential false positives are ranked last. We will develop a tool to perform continuous static analysis with different static analyzers and propose a warning classification method using their outputs. We will also propose a visualization approach for the information generated with our tool.

Notes & references

Static Analysis SIG

Migrate Plinth to Fedora Server

Status Proposed - draft

Skill level

Novice

Skills required

  • Python and Django

  • Git

  • dnf knowledge

  • ARM based hardware is a plus

  • RPM packaging knowledge is a plus

Mentor(s)

Tong Hui (first year, UTC+8, please be patient!)

Contacts (IRC & email)

Idea description

Plinth is developed by Freedombox which is a Debian based project. The Freedombox is aiming for building a 100% free software self-hosting web server to deploy social applications on small machines. It provides online communication tools respecting user privacy and data ownership, replacing services provided by third-parties that under surveillance. Plinth is the front-end of Freedombox, written in Python.

This idea mainly about migrate Plinth from Deb-based to RPM-based, and make it available for Fedora Server which will running on ARM machines. It would be better of student to be familiar with ARM based hardware and knowing something about how to running a Fedora Server on it, or use something like Qemu if you don’t know hardware.

The main goal of this idea is to make Plinth works fine in Fedora Server or Minimal flavor, due to Plinth write APT commands hard coded, so it is better yo make it more adoptive for RPM. The secondary goal is to make a RPM package for Plinth from source and setup a repo for it, so that everyone who use Fedora could use Plinth.

You will learn:

  • how to write modern test driven Python projects

  • how to running Fedora Server on a ARM machine.

  • how to migrate deb package to RPM package from source.

Notes & references

Architectures/ARM

Patternfly Frontend Pattern Development

Status Proposed - draft

Skill level

Intermediate

Skills required

Javascript

Mentor(s)

Brian Leathem

Contacts (IRC & email)

#patternfly & [email protected]

Idea description

Explore the emerging web component specifications by implementing patternfly.org patterns as web components. Begin with smaller simpler web component implementations to learn the APIs, then follow on with a more complex composite component to fully exercise the APIs and make a robust and feature-rich web components. Engage the PatternFly developer community to learn and contribute to the collective web component effort. //// don’t know if the link is working ////

Notes & references

link:https://patternfly-webcomponents.github.io/

Fedora Media Writer - New Features

Status Proposed - draft

Skill level

Intermediate

Skills required

C++/Qt and/or QML

Mentor(s)

Martin Bříza

Contacts (IRC & email)

mbriza on Freenode (for example on #fedora-devel or #fedora-apps ) or [email protected]

Idea description

Fedora Media Writer is a tool that makes putting Fedora images on portable media (such as flash drives) much easier. Since Fedora 25, it is offered as the default download options for users coming to Get Fedora from a Mac or a Windows computer.

Ever since the rewrite from liveusb-creator, there has been some features missing from it and due to the popular demand, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get them readded. You won’t need to implement all of these. Just one would be perfectly fine. However, please contact me first so we can arrange the details of your potential application.

There is a short list of some things that could be done (however, feel free to get in touch about anything else, or look on the GitHub page for some more):

  • Persistent storage. To explain how it works, I’ll start with how live media works now for us: After booting into the live system, you can do whatever you want, install programs, save files to your home folder or even modify the root filesystem, as much as your free memory permits you. However, after rebooting you lose all those changes because the partitions on the drive are not touched. Persistent storage adds the possibility to retain those changes through reboots so you would be able to install new apps to your live environment or work with files stored on the flash drive.

  • Being able to write the images without destroying the data that was already present on the flash drive before.

  • Having a Fedora ARM image resized to fit the size of your SD card immediately after having it written.

  • Proper privilege escalation through launchd for the helper process on macOS.

Understanding of libraries and techniques relevant to this project on Linux, Mac or Windows (or all of them) is a big plus.

You’ll learn more about multiplatform development and be involved in the project that is the first thing new users see when they are going to try Fedora.

Notes & references

link:https://github.com/MartinBriza/MediaWriter

Adwaita and HighContrast style for QtQuickControls

Status Proposed - draft

Skill level

Novice

Skills required

QML and a little bit of C++

Mentor(s)

User:Mbriza[Martin Bříza]

Contacts (IRC & email)

mbriza on Freenode (for example on #fedora-devel or #fedora-apps ) or [email protected]

Idea description

Fedora Workstation ships custom Qt themes that match its Adwaita and Highcontrast themes from its default GNOME desktop environment. This makes Qt applications blend nicely into the overall Fedora Worstation experience.

However, to fully support most of the Qt applications, we need to have QtQuickControls (QML) themes implemented, too.

Work on this would consist of three main parts:

  • Figuring out where and how to install the theme (CMake)

  • Implementing the look of all necessary widgets (QML)

  • Making this theme selected by default when the app runs in GNOME (probably C++, in the QGnomePlatform project)

This project is best suited to a candidate who wants to learn about QML.

Notes & references

link:https://github.com/MartinBriza/adwaita-qt

link:https://github.com/MartinBriza/highcontrast-qt

link:https://github.com/MartinBriza/QGnomePlatform

Fedora CommOps : Centralized Metrics generation

Status Proposed - draft

Skill level

Intermediate

Skills required

Required:

  • Python

  • Basic understanding of APIs

  • Flask

Bonus Skills:

  • Data analytics algorithms

  • Knowledge of Fedora Apps

Mentor(s)

Sachin S. Kamath (skamath) Bhagyashree(Bee) (bee2502)

Contacts (IRC & email)

#fedora-commops & [email protected]

Idea description

Right now, metrics collection in CommOps is not very efficient and requires a lot of manual work. Metrics for various events/FAS groups/users are collected using scripts which query datagrepper and return results. This process is very time consuming and writing scripts each time is a very tedious process. Also, querying the datagrepper to get data everytime is redundant and time-consuming.

Hack on statscache to build a central metrics generation system for Fedora with handy features to pull statistics. Take a look at the Pagure ticket for more details.

Notes & references

Pagure ticket

Open Ideas From GSoC 2016

In addition to the above list of ideas, you may want to check out ideas from previous years and contact the mentors for those projects to see if they’re still interested in mentoring someone this year.

Note: Do not submit a proposal for an idea from a previous year without contacting the mentor to ensure they will be available to mentor you. Without a mentor, proposals will be rejected.

Want to help? Learn how to contribute to Fedora Docs ›