Suggestions for possible GSoC project proposals regarding Wayland/X11 development?

[Peter Hutterer]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 02:52:11PM -0400, Stephen Chandler Paul wrote:
> Hello,
> 	I'm a college student who is looking into taking part in the Google
> Summer of Code, specifically with X.Org and Wayland. However, I've been
> having a bit of a challenge finding a project proposal that I think I
> would be able to implement, and one that involves working with Wayland
> (or if that's not possible, X.Org) and is requires enough work to be a
> reasonable proposal for GSoC.
> 	As of now I currently have a mild amount of experience with the X11
> codebase, as I took part in designing and implementing support in
> xf86-input-synaptics for emulating soft buttons for TrackPoints on the
> latest series of Lenovo laptops, and managed to get two commits merged
> upstream. I have taken a look of the list of possible proposals on the
> X.Org page and although it is possible I might be able to handle them
> once I do more research on the issues in X they cover, I want to see if
> I can find a proposal with Wayland or Xorg that I would feel more
> comfortable implementing and using as my proposal when the nearing
> deadline for GSoC applications come before choosing one of those.
> 	The vast majority of my programming experience is with the C
> programming language and I have managed to attain a very solid
> understanding of the language, I also have a good amount of experience
> with glib and GTK+3. Other then working with the TrackPoint soft
> buttons, my hardware experience is limited but I am always willing to
> learn and pick up any additional skills I might need.
> 	This being said, I'm digging through Google results and IRC channels in
> search of a potential proposal. I've looked around and tried to find a
> solid roadmap or to-do list for Wayland that I could make one with, but
> the only one I managed to find is apparently very out dated.
> 	I've asked around in #Wayland and Zoxc presented a task that sounds
> like it might be perfect for me: Implementing color management in
> Weston/Wayland (this is also why I Cc'd openicc at lists.freedesktop.org)
> and updating his current patches to work with the latest versions of
> Wayland/Weston. The patches he mentioned can be found here:
> https://github.com/Zoxc/weston/compare/master...gl-work , and the
> current proposal for how color management will be implemented that he
> has come up with can be found here:
> https://github.com/Zoxc/weston/blob/cms/protocol/cms.xml . This is
> something I'd be perfectly willing to undertake, but I don't know if
> this is something that would be a large enough project to be a
> reasonable proposal.
> 
> 	So I'd like to ask if you guys had any ideas for good GSoC proposals
> concerning (preferably)Wayland or X11 that aren't currently listed on
> the suggestions page for X.org GSoC project proposals on
> FreeDesktop.org? I'd also like to know if the project proposal I
> currently have, implementing color management for Weston/Wayland, is
> something you guys think would be a reasonable project proposal for
> GSoC.

one of the projects I can think of is graphics tablet support in wayland.
This requires a whole bunch of changes in a couple of components:
- libinput needs to be modified to support tablets
- a wayland protocol needs to be designed to get that information to the
clients (I had a proposal last september, can be extended)
- the matching weston implementation
- client-side code to test this, including e.g. GTK

This is a rather big project, so it needs to be well scoped so you know what
you're getting yourself into :) There are a lot of oddities and quirks about
tablets at the moment.

Cheers,
   Peter