2008 Google Summer of Code Highlights

andrewmin writes "SoC 2008 has begun, and with 175 organizations and 1125 students it looks better than ever before. Here's a quick run-down of a few programs that, if they are finished, will definitely be making their way onto your machine."

Comments

E17?

[Doobian Coedifier]

Cross-platform is now officially the hottest thing for desktop environments. First, KDE announced that KDE 4 was being ported to Windows and OS X. Now, the lesser known Enlightenment project is doing the same thing. Student Dzmitry Mazouka is now porting the Ewl and Etk libraries to the Win32 platform. How about finishing Enlightenment 0.17? I've been waiting for almost 8 years now...

Re:E17?

[an.echte.trilingue]

The difference is that you are going to pay somebody to do those things. Enlightenment is done as a hobby, and it still manages to come up with some pretty cool stuff that works its way into somebody's code or maybe even a finished DE someday. However, complaining that unpaid hobbyists should abandon what they enjoy doing to in favor of pursuing your priorities is like asking the guy how lives next door who builds hotrods for fun to come and fix your toyota. If you want them to finish E17 that bad, either pay them to do it or do it yourself.

Oh, and before I get that troll who says that this is the problem with open source, I would like to point out that the "hobby" development is not typical of open source software; most people who work on OSS get paid to do it (for example, by redhat, novell, mysql, sun, ibm, trolltech [now owned by nokia] etc.)

Re:GRUB GUI?

[Knuckles]

Editing menu.lst hardly qualifies as a GUI.

Re:Get GRUB2 production ready first...

[Z-MaxX]

Many GRUB developers are working diligently toward a production ready version of GRUB 2. I am a new contributor to the GRUB project and the reason I chose this feature to implement is because it meshes with my areas of expertise and interest. Also, I feel that making GRUB 2 usable by everyone (let's face it, right now that means it has to be supported by Ubuntu) is a very important goal. In order for Ubuntu to adopt GRUB 2, it will have to not only be functionally complete, but they will want it to look nice too, as the rest of the OS will.

No argument that it will be great to have GRUB 2 production ready. I am looking forward to it, and I hope I can contribute to other features after I complete the graphical menu system.

Colin

Re:Pidgin projects are cool

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What would it take to add direct connection transfer support to Pidgin so I can actually send someone a file on MSN? Currently it maxes out around 4KB/s which is useless. I always wondered why this is not a priority.

I imagine support for all closed, legacy formats is a pretty low priority. Why prioritize reverse engineering and optimizing less used features of an intentionally obfuscated format championed by someone trying to prevent the type of interoperability that is Pidgin's goal? Isn't it better for them to optimize file transfer over XMMP or the video and voice capabilities? I mean, if you want to transfer files with other users, there are plenty of other protocols that do work and where the Pidgin team doesn't have to work so hard only to have it intentionally broken by Microsoft at a later date. It is an inefficient use of their resources compared to working on core features using open protocols where they don't have to put in all that extra effort to overcome MS's antics.

Re:definitely be making their way onto your machin

[Z-MaxX]

A nice UI may be more important for a Live CD install/rescue disk, for instance, where there are many choices, and you want it to simple to use and self-explanatory for any user booting the disk. Also, GRUB 2 uses dynamically loadable modules for virtually everything, so you can just not load the future 'gfxmenu' module if you like. Then it will consume no memory and will not be a possible source of problems.