GSOC 2016: starting points for beginners

[Dmitry V. L. <ld...@al...>]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2016 at 05:01:41PM +0530, Shubham Chaudhary wrote:
[...]
> I was wondering where would I begin if I were to start by familiarising
> my self with the codebase, fixing a few bugs, etc.

On Wed, Mar 02, 2016 at 09:30:15PM -0500, Basavaraj Kaladagi wrote:
[...]
> Can anyone please help me to get started. I wanted to start with a simple
> bug-fix to get initiated with, but could not find any bug's list.

As strace is a project with ~25 years of history, it doesn't provide low
hanging fruits in form of bugs that are easy to find and fix.  It doesn't
mean that there are no such bugs, I just think it's unlikely that you'll
be fortunate enough to find and fix one in a short time.  Unless you have
an inquisitive mind and a natural inclination to fix bugs, I'd recommend
to focus on something else that's easy to start with.

If you are looking for something to code that does not require deep
knowledge of strace internals, there are at least two areas that come                
to mind:

1. The most popular idea that was mentioned several times in this list
recently is to add a test for a syscall that's not yet covered by the test
suite.  See https://codecov.io/github/strace/strace for a general idea
what's covered and what's not.  As virtually every GSoC project expects
writing some tests, the experience of extending test suite would be useful
anyway.

2. Another idea is to extend -e trace=class syntax with new classes.
strace currently supports desc, file, ipc, memory, network, process, and
signal.  Additional classes might be useful, e.g. all open-like syscalls,
all stat-like syscalls, all syscalls dealing with uid/gid, etc.  This was
discussed in this list already, so please see the mailing list archive.


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