Nice.

 

Just porting dwm or some of its features to rio would probably be not enough for a gsoc project. However, you have lots of interesting options to expand on that.

First, whatever you do must have, at some point, the form of a file server, and you will have to play with the design until you find the right one. It's easy to think in wmii-like file servers where you copy a window to a tag with cp (or bind) and remove it with rm. Maybe even some interesting new feature comes up naturally (the rio design makes natural running rio inside rio, maybe whatever you do makes natural to have tags inside tags or whatever). You also have to keep in mind that most of the Plan 9 programs were intended to be used with a mouse, so although key bindings may be implemented it should be comfortable for mouse users too (you also have interesting options here, just now I'm using a mouse-controlled dwm version and works quite well).

Also, keep in mind that there is already a well known and popular tiling environment in Plan 9. If you are able to make a window manager with an acme feeling I'm sure many users would be interested. The challenge here is to have the good taste required to come up with the right design, and that's quite a challenge.

 

I don't think nobody is sure about anything. Certainly, there is a way to have a "drawterm in the browser", but it is not clear how to do it. I guess figuring this out may be the first task. You will need some way to draw to the screen and read input events, and you will need to provide a 9P servers for applications to use. Drawing to the screen will probably involve the HTML5 canvas and some dynamic language. The 9P server could be implemented at different levels. There are many 9P libraries for different languages and platforms which may be used, or you could use a custom protocol like p9p's devdraw and then implement the 9P server in Inferno, Plan9 or some program in the local host. And then, you need to glue both parts together.

There are many options here, I think many of us have our own opinion on the best way to achieve this. You will have to discuss the details with your mentor. In any case, I think if you are confident to implement the "web part" of the project, serving 9P is not going to be a significant problem, and you could easily get some help for that.

I think it is feasible to finish this project in a summer, but it won't be easy.

 

 Good luck!