GoogleCodeIn/2012/Ideas

Guidelines

Information for Students

This page is for collecting ideas for Google Code-in tasks. The tasks will be moved into Melange for you to claim when appropriate.

Adding a Proposal

Please only add proposals you are willing to mentor!

Please keep in mind that the tasks are going to be solved by 13 to 17 year olds.

When adding an idea to this section, please try to include the following data:

• a brief explanation
• the expected results
• prerequisites for working on your project if any
• if applicable, links to more information or discussions
• your name and email address for contact

The proposals should be ordered by area:

• Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
• Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
• Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing
• Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
• Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions
• Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more
• User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

If you have a good idea for a proposal but are not going to mentor it, get in contact with relevant team/contributor first.

Ideas

Code

Amarok: Check Copyright Headers and Collect Contributor Email Addresses

Description

Amarok should be GPLv2+ licensed throughout, but not all license headers seem to contain the correct statement. Some files even miss a license header. If there is a incorrect license stated in a header the copyright holders should be contacted before making the fix. It could have been intentional (unlikely). It's useful to know who contributed to various parts of Amarok and during which period for statistical reasons. If we get a complete list and manage to maintain it, any future license changes (ex. to GPLv3) will be easier.

Mentors

Kexi: add d-pointers to classes

Description

Improve internal APIs in Kexi. This can be done easily by introducing d-poitners to classes that lack them. Details on Kexi wiki.

Prerequisites

General C++ knowledge, prior knowledge of Qt is a plus.

Mentor

Jstaniek (talk)

Pairs: add Get Hot New Stuff upload feature to Pairseditor

Description

Create a new action to provide the user to upload hers/his new Pairs Theme to a public server to make it available for the Get Hot New Stuff feature in the game.

Mentors

Marco Calignano ([email protected]) and Aleix Pol ([email protected])

KGet: Code Stlye Check and Cleanup

Description

KGet currently consists of several lines of code which do not confirm to the KDE coding conventions. The task is to have KGet's codebase follow the coding conventions.

Mentors

Aish Raj Dahal [1], Lukas Appelhans [2]

Documentation/Training

Amarok: Reorganize wiki in its new location

Description

Amarok is changing the location of its wiki and also needs to reorganize its wiki structure. Previously everything was in the same wiki, now we are moving to the 3 wiki site of KDE: Techbase, Community and Userbase. The existing pages need to be checked for consistency and moved to their new location after having made a structure plan.

Prerequisites

The student should be able to grasp large sets of data and be able to organize these in a logical manner. Some basic mediawiki editing knowledge is a plus.

Links

• Current wiki location
• Main target in the community wiki
• Techbase main target page
• Userbase main target page

Mentor

Myriam Schweingruber

Update KSirK documentation

Description

KSirK documentation is moderate outdated (outdated screenshots, no description of new main menu items). Student should download documentation source and update it using HTML version as a reference, new screenshots for the default KDE theme (Oxygen) should be also presented.

Prerequisites

Moderate level of English, KDE distribution installed or run from live image.

Links

• Reference on docbook syntax
• Manual on how to take a screenshot

Mentor

Yuir Chornoivan

Outreach/Research

Amarok: Make a "Team" page

Description

Based on information from Amarok's "About" dialog, various social networks such as openDesktop.org, and talking to team members, make a "Team" page on Amarok's project website, like [3] or [4]. We're specifically interested in a nice design and layout, and can fill out the data ourselves later on.

Mentor

KDE Forums: clean up KDE Brainstorm

Description

Currently the KDE Brainstorm (http://brainstorm.forum.kde.org) includes a lot of invalid, duplicate, or already fixed ideas. In order for both users and developers to screen them effectively, they need to be reorganized. The Brainstorm interface already allows to do this: the task involves looking through the open ideas and mark them as fixed, invalid, in progress, or finished.

Prerequisites

Some general knowledge about the current progress of KDE software, including recent developments.

Mentor

Luca Beltrame ([email protected])

Metrics: Check Ohloh organisation page

Description

KDE is a showcase in Ohloh's new organisation feature. We need to make sure the information in the project is accurate. Please check if there are any missing projects in the project listing and if they are correctly categorized as being a KDE project. Check for other improvements that can be done and suggest them.

Mentor

Lydia Pintscher

Metrics: MLStats

Description

Investigate MLStats and create some useful statistics for 3 mailing lists. Document your findings and work so it can be extended later.

Mentor

Lydia Pintscher

Metrics: Git stats

Description

Investigate some options to get statistics out of git that let us learn more about the project and the people working on it. Document your findings and their benefits, drawbacks and what the individual options can do.

Mentor

Lydia Pintscher

Promo: new Twitter and identi.ca backgrounds

Description

Create new backgrounds for identi.ca and Twitter similar to the ones at Promo/Material/Microblogging.

Mentor

Lydia Pintscher

Quality Assurance

Pairs Editor: testing it

Description

The Pairs Editor is a new application and needs to be tested by actual users. The student will have to try create a pairs theme using the editor and help us figure out the parts that are not working that well.

Mentor

Aleix Pol and Marco Calignano

Amarok: Testing from git

Description

While Amarok ships a stable version there also is the current development version. The student should build a development installation from git and test the main functions of Amarok and report back eventual errors, inconsistencies and bugs.

Prerequisites

The student must be able to follow clear written instructions, have a logical way of thinking. Must be able to test software independently after a short introduction

Links

• List of Amarok feature tests
• Local build instructions

Mentor

Myriam Schweingruber

User Interface

Kexi: find UI issues while running under non-KDE desktop

Description

Review Kexi UI to find glitches while running under non-KDE desktop such as Unity, GNOME or Xfce. Since Kexi is highly portable software, it is desired to have it adaptable to current look and feel of the underlying desktop.
Any found issue, suggestion or doubt should be reported. Proposing solutions is welcome too but not necessary. Providing screen shots and details of system (desktop) configuration is expected. No software engineering skills are needed. User-level understanding of Kexi is preferred.

Prerequisites

Ability of gathering data from users, aggregating it and structuring; UI design/analytic skills are welcome.

Mentor

Jstaniek (talk)

Pairs: create a new icon for Pairseditor

Description

Modify the Pairs game icon to create a new icon for the Pairseditor

Mentor

Marco Calignano ([email protected]) and Aleix Pol ([email protected])