Re: Call for Google Summer of Code 2021 project ideas

[Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>]

John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> writes:

> On 1/11/21 6:47 AM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> Dear QEMU, KVM, and rust-vmm community,
>> QEMU will apply for Google Summer of Code
>> (https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/) again this year.  This internship
>> program offers paid, 10-week, remote work internships for
>> contributing to open source.  QEMU can act as an umbrella organization
>> for KVM kernel and rust-vmm projects too.
>> Please post project ideas on the QEMU wiki before February 14th:
>> https://wiki.qemu.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2021
>> What's new this year:
>>   * The number of internship hours has been halved to 175 hours over
>>     10 weeks. Project ideas must be smaller to fit and students will have
>>     more flexibility with their working hours.
>>   * Eligibility has been expanded to include "licensed coding school or
>>     similar type of program".
>> Good project ideas are suitable for 175 hours (10 weeks half-day)
>> work by a
>> competent programmer who is not yet familiar with the codebase.  In
>> addition, they are:
>>   * Well-defined - the scope is clear
>>   * Self-contained - there are few dependencies
>>   * Uncontroversial - they are acceptable to the community
>>   * Incremental - they produce deliverables along the way
>> Feel free to post ideas even if you are unable to mentor the
>> project.
>> It doesn't hurt to share the idea!
>> 
>
> I have one that is probably way too ambitious, but requires a
> particular skillset that might be of good interest to a student that
> has some experience in the area already.
>
> The idea is for a TUI qmp-shell (maybe using urwid?) to create an
> irssi-like REPL interface for QMP. The idea would be to mimic the 
> mitmproxy TUI interface (Check it out if you haven't!)
>
> All the ideas below are extremely tentative to give a basic gist of
> what I mean; exact layouts/hotkeys/etc are for the sake of explanation
> only.
>
> Essentially, I want an interface like this:
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> | QMP Mode                                                |
> |=========================================================|
> |                                                         |
> | Welcome to the Qemu Machine Protocol shell.             |
> | Please type /help or Ctrl+H to see available commands.  |
> |                                                         |
> |                                                         |
> |                                                         |
> |---------------------------------------------------------|
> | >                                                       |
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
> commands are entered in the bottom and appear in a log window above,
> appearing most-recent last, like irssi works.
>
> As an example, let's say we issue block-dirty-bitmap-add:
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> | > block-dirty-bitmap-add node=ide0hd0 name=mybitmap0 |
> --------------------------------------------------------
>
> (...syntax up for debate...! We want something easy to parse, but easy
> to type. For structured data, that's Hard.)

"Hard" is a red flag for such a brief internship.  We need to solve or
somehow exclude this design problem before we hand the task to the
student.

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