[9fans] request for more GSoC project suggestions

[Charles Forsyth <forsyth@terzarima.net>]

There are GSoC project suggestions at http://gsoc.cat-v.org/ideas/
but I think more are needed, and that it would be especially good
to have a further set of useful but simpler and smaller projects.

Projects need to be non-trivial for GSoC, but shouldn't
be hard enough that many of us would shun them (or indeed, have shunned them).
Based on my experience several years ago,
I'd also look for projects that are modular, so that the set of deliverables can be extended
or reduced depending how things go. That worked well for the
projects I was involved with.

The problem with ports of the system or device driver writing, in my experience,
is that satisfying though they are, and as necessary
as they might be, they are typically quite hard to
supervise, and will usually be fairly difficult for relative novices.
There is quite a bit to learn for most students just to
get started and be productive in the programming environment,
although 9vx does make that much easier.
Application-level projects are typically easier to
supervise because they don't need specialised equipment,
and many more people on this list and elsewhere can help
with plausible advice, and also help debug when students are stuck. (Advice will
sometimes be contradictory, but that's not a bad lesson to learn, too.)
It's quite hard to help when special hardware or kernel-level debugging is involved.
Because quite a bit in Plan 9 (or Inferno/9vx/p9p etc) is done at
user-level that is done at kernel-level in other systems, that shouldn't
narrow the scope much.  I wrote "application-level" not just "user-level"
earlier because I thought it would be good to have some
interesting applications of the system.  Of course, I don't mean
to preclude system-level things when students are especially keen
on that (as indeed I was during my school and university years).

I don't know where the best place to suggest or discuss them would be,
but I thought this list would reach nearly everyone interested.