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1996-09-28
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A M I G A D E V E L O P E R S E N V I R O N M E N T
P R O J E C T L I S T
(Updated 10-May-96)
[Note: This is a preliminary draft which will change greatly over the next
few weeks, as it is converted to texinfo format (from which we can
automatically generate AmigaGuide files, GNU info files, dvi files, and
PostScript files.]
================
HOW YOU CAN HELP
================
There is an incredible amount of programmer talent available in the Amiga
community, with an incalculable amount of hours going into producing demos,
freely distributable software, shareware, and other such goodies. If only
1% of that effort could be harnessed to improve the ADE, we could easily
have a standard set of freely available tools that would rival any
commercially available tools for the Amiga.
You do not have to be an expert AmigaOS programmer to help. Neither do you
have to be an expert in compiler or other software tools technology. All
you have to do is be willing to learn and be willing to work in a community
effort.
As you read the project list, look for things that you think are within your
capabilities to either work on, or to help test, or even simply to help
document. If you think of something interesting that either needs doing by
yourself or someone else, send that suggestion to the maintainer of this
list. Tackle as big or as small of a project as your skills and available
time permits. Think of it as "adopting a program".
=======
REWARDS
=======
For certain projects we may offer small rewards to the first person or team
of persons to complete them. If you can't help with a project, perhaps you
or the company you work for can contribute to an award for a specific
project. You can pledge an award for any project you wish.
==========
DIFFICULTY
==========
Each project has a rating of how difficult it is. This is an *educated
guess* only, so in reality it may turn out to be easier/more difficult than
expected. In general, easy projects can be done by anyone with some C
programming knowledge, and preferably some knowledge about tools like
'make'. If you get stuck, just ask. There are always people willing to
help out.
Projects of average difficulty can be done by anyone who has a reasonable C
programming experience and a more than passing knowledge of Unix-like
systems. Again, if you get stuck somewhere, just ask.
Finally, difficult projects require a solid knowledge about Unix and C
programming. You must be aware of the Unix kernel functions and about the
pitfalls and complexities of programming in a multitasking evironment. Also
knowledge about 680x0 programming is required for some projects. As usual,
if you get stuck, ask.
Often, the difficulty rating is a range (easy-average, average-difficult).
In that case it wasn't possible to make a very educated guess because nobody
had really looked into it to find out what exactly needs to be done. So
you'll have to find out as you go along.
============
PROJECT LIST
============
This is a list of projects related to maintenance or development of the ADE.
This list is currently being maintained by Fred Fish (fnf@amigalib.com).
============
PROJECT: Get binutils changes merged back into main source
DESCRIPTION
Take the changes that were made in 2.6 and work with the
maintainers of binutils at cygnus to ensure that those
changes will still work in the next release and also
hopefully to get the changes accepted into the master source
tree so they don't have to be maintained separately.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Average
STATUS: No current activity
============
PROJECT: Test -RESIDENT (-resident with 32-bit offsets)
DESCRIPTION
An option -flarge-baserel exists in gcc. This is the same as
-fbaserel, would overcome the 64K limit for data.
In order to test this all libraries need to be recompiled
with this flag. If it works, an option -RESIDENT or
-resident32 or whatever should be added to the specs file.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 2 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $40 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Easy
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Replace the current inlines by the new #define-based
inlines.
DESCRIPTION
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 2 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $40 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
STATUS: In progress
============
PROJECT: Fix latest version of GNU tar.
DESCRIPTION
Find out why 'cat t.tar.gz | tar xzvf -' fails to work for
large archives. Also find out why tar is unable to do
something like:
tar -Mxvf DEV:PC0
with any of the DEV-handlers on Aminet. Similar problems if
you use the PIPE: device instead. All is does is to print
Operation not supported by device
There have been two ports of GNU tar which worked and didn't
use ixemul.library, so maybe the problem is in
ixemul/open()?
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 2 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $40 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Easy
STATUS: Hans Verkuil has analyzed the first problem with piping and
tar still needs to be patched to work around it. Volunteers
can contact him for details.
============
PROJECT: Upgrade to the latest pdksh.
DESCRIPTION
Some work has been done on this by Lars Hecking
(lhecking@nmrc.ucc.ie). He has merged the diffs from 4.9
(and some more stuff) into 5.2.3. It compiles fine and runs
mostly ok interactively, but dies on scripts. It is
believed that fork()/vfork() emulation is incomplete.
There are also a couple of documented bugs in pdksh 4.9 that
either need to be fixed in 4.9 or else ensure they are fixed
in the updated version:
* In pdksh 4.9, the built in echo doesn't properly
handle args that start with '-', so we have to use GNU
echo.
* Pdksh 4.9 doesn't properly handle the following, either
interactively or in a script file. No warning or error
is generated, the elif clause is simply ignored:
if test -f foo
then
echo foo
elif test -f bar <--- missing following "then"
echo bar
fi
* Pdksh 4.9 does not properly handle the following:
cat >a.c <<EOF
EOF
VOLUNTEERS: David Zaroski (cz253@cleveland.Freenet.Ed)
DIFFICULTY: Difficult
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
============
PROJECT: Port bash.
DESCRIPTION
Some work has been done on this by Lars Hecking
(lhecking@nmrc.ucc.ie). He is able to supply a corrected
config.sh (the one generated from configure is faulty). As
for the pdksh port, some code needs to be written for
launching external progs (fork()/vfork() emulation, again).
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Difficult
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Add MuFS support to ixemul library
DESCRIPTION
Mike Krings <kringsm@athene.informatik.uni-bonn.de> has
already done some work on this. E.g. he has implemented
getpwuid() getpwname() getgrgid() and some more. But some
problems have come up. Functions like getpwuid() return the
data in a static buffer, which is difficult to implement in
a shared library. But this problem can be solved.
He will do some future work, if anyone could do the following stuff:
- open "multiuser.library" V39 on ixemul startup
- close it on shutdown
Also, the multiuser headers should be integrated into the
ixemul include tree in the ixemul source so anyone can
rebuild the library.
VOLUNTEERS: Hans Verkuil
REWARD: free Aminet or FreshFish CDs, quantity depends upon
actual work - furnished by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Average
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Implement the chip-keyword in gcc.
DESCRIPTION:
Some code already exists and it would be wonderful if
somebody would take this on.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Difficult
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Write an AmigaOS GUI for gdb
DESCRIPTION
Write a GUI for gdb. Gdb already has hooks for GUI's. A
good place to start would be to get and examine GDBTK, which
is a version of GDB that has a GUI written in TK. Available
from ftp.cygnus.com in pub/gdb.
VOLUNTEERS: Jason White (jpwhite@harp.aix.calpoly.edu)
REWARD: 10 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $200 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Difficult
STATUS: Jason has volunteered to do this and has a web page
for this project at http://www.calpoly.edu/~jpwhite/.
The project is already well under way and he expects to
meet the deadlines that he has set on the web page.
============
PROJECT: Update GNU emacs port to latest release
DESCRIPTION
Current EMACS ports are based on version 18.59. A port of
19.28 exists but is not stable. First step is to make it
stable and make it work, second step is to convert it so
that it compiles with GNU C as well as SAS/C.
One problem apparently with emacs19 is that it doesn't work
on systems that have different memory pools. That means that
Amiga's where the physical addresses of the memory boards
are far apart (say, 0x00300000-0x00500000,
0x07000000-0x07400000) cannot use emacs. It assumes that the
upper 8 bits of all memory addresses are preferably 0, or at
least always have the same constant value. And that's also a
problem with emacs 18. It will not run reliably on Amiga
which has such a problematic memory configuration.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 10 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $200 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Difficult
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Port ghostview
DESCRIPTION
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Average-difficult
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Fold changes back into main source bases
DESCRIPTION
Many of the changes currently in the ADE are candidates for
being folded back into the main source base for each of the
specific tools. You will need to work with the maintainer of
each tool to take the current changes and get them folded
back into his source tree. Some changes may require complete
reworks in order to make them acceptable, and some may be
acceptable "as is".
VOLUNTEERS:
DIFFICULTY: Average
REWARD: free Aminet or FreshFish CDs, quantity depends upon
actual work - furnished by Amiga Library Services
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Complete a port of the latest version of Perl
DESCRIPTION
Complete a port of the latest version of perl, including
having it pass it's testsuite. Some work has already been
done (fnf@amigalib.com).
VOLUNTEERS: Hans Verkuil
REWARD: 2 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $40 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
STATUS: No current activity. Hans is still waiting until Larry Wall
releases 5.002. As soon as he does that, he'll start porting
it. Especially with the new networking facilities of the
ixemul.library and the dld-port this can be a great program.
Larry released 5.001 way too early at the time (full of bugs)
and apparently he now wants to be sure all bugs are covered
before releasing 5.002. And that's also the reason why the
wait for 5.002.
============
PROJECT: Port TK to the Amiga
DESCRIPTION
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 10 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $200 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Average-difficult
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Turn TCL libraries into shared library tcl.library
DESCRIPTION The need for this is not yet established completely.
It seems reasonable, since tcl is such a cool thing,
and it would be good to have the shareable parts be
in a shared library.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Average
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Making tasking in GNU ADA work.
DESCRIPTION Probably requires porting effort of low level support
library.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 2 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $40 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Difficult
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Implement support to access the serial port in a Unix
compatible way.
DESCRIPTION: Many programs, such as gdb and GNU uucp, require access
to the serial port. In order to easily port these programs
support needs to be added to ixemul.library to emulate
the way Unix handles this. I'm not entirely sure what
exactly needs to be done, but it will probably entail
adding special handling for a /dev/ttya file (much like
the way /dev/null is currently handled).
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Average-difficult
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Port programs from the NetBSD distribution to the Amiga.
DESCRIPTION: The NetBSD distribution (ftp.netbsd.org) provides a huge
number of programs and utilities that are also free and
a lot of these programs are probably quite easy to port.
VOLUNTEERS: Hans Verkuil
REWARD: 2 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $40 - for each
"significant" port (includes making it GNU "make"
compatible and use autoconfig) - furnished by Amiga
Library Services
DIFFICULTY: Easy-average (depends on which programs you port, of course :-)
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Port glibc-1.09, the GNU standard C library.
DESCRIPTION: The PROJECT line says it all, really.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services.
DIFFICULTY: Average
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Merge useful parts from PasTeX into ADE unixtex
DESCRIPTION:
A very useful thing for someone to do would be to try
building PasTeX from the supplied source. Assuming that
works, and that the source is complete, there would probably
be some parts that would be very useful to merge into the
ADE unixtex, such as showdvi for example. At one time the
ADE unixtex was based on a newer version of TeX than PasTeX,
but I don't know if that is still true or not, if PasTeX has
been updated. In any case, ADE unixtex could also use some
updating from the CTAN archives.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 3 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $60 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services.
DIFFICULTY: Average
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Construct a shared/link library to use X11 programs/source
DESCRIPTION
Try to make an X11 emulation library so that X11 programs
can be compiled and linked with it and look like a 'normal'
Amiga program. Use the existing source of DJGPP's GRXLIB
(MSDOS GCC port) as a starting point. GRXLIB implements an
API to access VGA gfxcards. One could make an VGA card that
resembles the Amiga gfx chipset. Use the X11 emulation
library XlibEmu, which uses GRXLIB, to build the actual X11
emulation. Terje Pedersen did it so it is possible.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services.
DIFFICULTY: Might depend if the project could be splitted into
several parts or not.
STATUS: No current activity, well some ;)
============
PROJECT: "Amiga-fy" JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of EMACS)
DESCRIPTION
JOVE is a very nice, small EMACS type editor, which
comes from the contrib portion of the BSD distribution.
It would be very nice to have an Intuition interface
for it, rather than the current termcap based one.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services.
DIFFICULTY: Moderate.
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Turn libg++ into a shared library
DESCRIPTION
Libg++ contains most of the C++ runtime support for the
GNU C++ compiler. It would be very useful to have a
shared library version available, as well as the regular
link library.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services.
DIFFICULTY: Moderate.
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Port Red Hat Linux's RPM
DESCRIPTION
The ADE needs a package management system, that keeps
track of what packages are installed, what files belong
to what packages, what the versions are of each package,
uninstalling a package, upgrading an installed package,
etc. The Red Hat Linux distribution has such a package,
called RPM.
VOLUNTEERS:
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services.
DIFFICULTY: Moderate to easy.
STATUS: No current activity.
============
PROJECT: Generate Objective-C runtime shared library
DESCRIPTION
Transform the GNU Objective-C runtime library (libobjc.a)
into an Amiga shared library.
VOLUNTEERS: Laurent Peron (Laurent.Peron@emi.u-bordeaux.fr)
REWARD: 5 free Aminet or FreshFish CDs - value $100 - furnished
by Amiga Library Services.
DIFFICULTY: Moderate.
STATUS: Summer project of Laurent's, status report Sept 96.