[gentoo-soc] Some project ideas

[Antoine Pinsard]

Hi again,

I have two more project ideas and wonder if they are good ones and if
they fit well the summer of code.

The first one came from this discussion on Gentoo-Chat:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-951096.html

According to some users (well, actually one for the time being), some
portage tools "are out of date or do not completely fulfill the
requirements of users" (last message of the first page).

The idea is thus to fetch these tools and put them into two lists: those
which need a few fixes and those which are better to be fully rewritten.
Then evaluate which ones can be done while the summer of code.

Do you think it could be a good subject?

I do also have another project idea, but I think it rolls a bit away
from Gentoo's scope.

I noticed that the documentation is a step that is often omitted or
botched by developers. However this is a very important step, especially
in open source development. So, the idea is to set up a platform (a
website) that 1) somehow encourages documentation writing and 2) gather
people that have documentation (or translation) skills (and enjoy doing
it) to document other's piece of code. Of course it will require that
the code is already well-written and enough documented. But the goal is
to provide out-of-code documentations for both developers and users so
that more pieces of open source code could be used and improved by more
people.

I tried to sum up the idea without giving too much details. I'd mainly
like to know whether it could be a good project or not (and I am a bit
doubtful about that).

Thanks