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Google Summer of Code 2015 Projects

Hello prospective students! If you're interested in other projects than those listed above, come talk to us on IRC urgently as we need to put the projects down for Google before the 20th of February.

Our IRC channel is #xfce-dev on Freenode.

Anonymous collection of user preferences

Mentor: Steve Dodier-Lazaro (sidi on IRC, sidi@xfce.org)

This project aims to help us developer better apps for our users by understanding their needs and preferences better. We want you to develop a few components:

  1. A dialog to ask for user consent and store their reply, and negotiates a unique, random ID following a specific pattern for the user (for spam protection)
  2. A client application that, when launched, looks up the Xfconf settings of the user (and a few things like locale,timezone) bundles all the data in a convenient format e.g. YAML, and sends it the server over an encrypted connection
  3. A patch for Xfce4's settings daemon to spawn the dialog at a sensible time and to launch the client every month
  4. A server application that waits for new clients to negotiate IDs with, and that waits for existing clients to send their settings file every month; that stores these files and provides an authenticated interface for Xfce developers to access them
  5. Optional: build hooks in the Whisker menu, Thunar and Appfinder to help us identify how people start new applications, and which applications they use the most.

Skills required:

  • Web programming! We probably prefer the server bit to be written in PHP.
  • More programming: The client bit should have a GTK+ UI, but could be done in C, Python, Vala, etc. as long as you know you have access to the libraries you need.
  • Correct understanding of encryption and computer security