Google Summer of Code project: libchannel

[Fredrik Hammar]

Hi everyone,

first up let me introduce myself, my name is Fredrik Hammar and I'm a
2:nd year computer science under-graduate at Lund's University here in
Sweden.  My main intrests in the field are OSes, compilers and theory
of programming languages.  Although I've haven't gotten the chance to
study any of those properly yet :(.

I've been interested in the Hurd for quite some time now, I had it
installed and used it about 6 months ago but botched my installation
when I realized PPPoE wasn't available, which made it quite
impractical for me to use.  But not before writing a trivial
translator that returned prime-numbers ;), and signing up a couple of
your mailing lists, mainly to lurk and follow the interesting
discussions about l4-Hurd (and beyond).

I was thinking about how to get by during the summer when I noticed
you guys on as mentors for Google summer of code, which reinvigorated
my interest of the Hurd.  So I reinstalled the Hurd, but this time on
qemu so I don't have to reboot to access the net and later I hope to
get it running on Xen.

Then I proceeded investigating the proposed projects and libchannel is
the one that interests me the most.  However it might be a bit more
than I can chew...

The main problem is my lack of experience with the Hurd's internals
and OSes in general.  But since my studies right now are quite
relaxed, I feel I should be able to catch up by the time GsoC starts.
I could easily spend 10h a week studying the Hurd and `bonding' with
you guys (as Google puts it), and will spend more time than that as
needed if it's available.  As a plus studying libstore during this
time, which should help me immensely with the design of libchannel,
will give me an opportunity to go through and fix some of libstore's
documentation.

Luckily I DO have experience with C, make and autotools, although
mainly on small projects of my own and nothing this big.

All the other suggestions also seem to require similar knowledge of
the Hurd (although not as much) in addition to something else of which
I have little or no experience with (sound, nfs, etc.).  I've also
been considering doing a project on GCC, but I've only come up with
pretty sketchy ideas.

So I want a second opinion; should I go for it and write a proposal
for a libchannel implementation or should I consider some other
project instead?

Eagerly awating response,
Fredrik

PS. I'm new to posting on mailing lists, please excuse and correct any
misstakes I make.