Help-wanted tasks for musl

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

Hi all,
Here are some tasks I could really use some help on, based on current
topics and requests that have come up on the list and IRC. Any
volunteers? See below...

Rich



Research on NSCD protocol

Interfacing with a proxy/cache daemon using nscd protocol is one of
the proposed options for allowing musl to deal with NIS/LDAP/etc. user
databases. In order to evaluate the option, we need to know how the
protocol works and what's involved in making queries and receiving
responses. Documenting how it works would be really helpful. I'm not
looking for big, complete protocol documentation, just simple
descriptions and examples of how queries are conducted.


Analysis of Gregor's pkgsrc failure results

Gregor Richards has run the whole NetBSD pkgsrc build (over 10k
packages) against musl and posted reports to the mailing list and
wiki. Some analysis on the most frequent causes of failure could be
extremely helpful to improving compatibility. It would also be nice to
identify major dependency failures that can be fixed (either in the
upstream package if it's buggy, or in musl if it's due to missing
features) so that the packages which depend on them can be tested too.
I'm looking to get results in the form of "we should fix X and Y and Z
and then lots more packages will work".


Preparing MD5 and SHA crypt for integration

See the threads on the list. Basically we need source with appropriate
license status (MIT/BSD/permissive or public domain) that's optimized
for size.


Regression testing

This is a big project, but there are lots of things that can be done
to contribute without doing it all. Basically it entails reading the
git log, identifying all bugs fixed, and for each bug, formulating a
test that reflects whether the bug exists or not.