Please visit http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/GSoC2013 for Google Summer of Code 2013.
If you're interested in participating, please email itamar at itamarst dot org. (If you don't get a timely response, try the mailing list, my spam filter can be aggressive sometimes).
If applicable, you may also be interested in http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/WomenOutreach2012
The basic process:
1. You get in touch, start getting familiar with the Twisted development process (see below). 1. We create a project proposal together (see http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2012/faqs#student_application_looks) 1. You apply on the Google Summer of Code web page (https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2012) for the Python Software Foundation group, with the project proposal we created. 1. Your project is (hopefully) approved - not all students will be accepted, unfortunately, depending on how many slots Google gives the project and how many applicants there are.
These are just ideas, we're open to other ideas as well.
[wiki:IPv6]: IPv6 is the new networking standard for the Internet; World IPv6 Day is happening soon (http://www.worldipv6day.org/). We are still missing SSL, UDP, and multicast IPv6 support, not to mention IPv6 DNS lookups. Add IPv6 support for these transports with a full API and test coverage for these additions. Add relevant examples and documentation.
Requirements: In addition to Python, a decent understanding of networking and socket APIs.
The reactor runs lots of events; connectionMade, dataReceived, connectionLost, timed calls, and queued calls from callFromThread. But currently there's no tools to discover how long those events took, or what resources they consumed, so when one event makes your reactor get "stuck" you might not know which one it is without some manual instrumentation.
You could build a reporting protocol which would report timings and potentially other relevant status information on the reactor's activities to a client connected on an appropriate socket. For example: the longest, shortest, mean and median event times over a particular interval, and which objects and code were involved in the longest and shortest. (This would not necessarily involve a user interface, just the internal infrastructure necessary to extract and report this information to other tools which could make sense of it.)
Requirements: an understanding of event-driven programming, and some experience with monitoring or performance tools.
Build a user interface (a GUI, or maybe even Web-based). The idea is to have a debugging user interface for running a Twisted process that shows existing listening ports and open connections, and allows you to view bytes flowing over the transports. This would look you look at a running Twisted program and see what was going on inside and what data was flowing through it. (Twisted currently includes a half-broken "gladereactor" that is a gtk-based half-finished implementation of this). You'll learn about Twisted's internals, and get to build an interesting user interface and present information in a useful way.
Requirements: In addition to Python, some knowledge of either GUI programming or Web programming.
Finish converting our documentation from a custom format and set of tools that we maintain (Lore) to the Python community standard - RestructuredText (ReST) as used by http://sphinx.pocoo.org/. In particular, resolve all tickets in the [milestone:"Lore] milestone and then help transition the release process and twistedmatrix.com to Sphinx by participating in a release. You'll learn about releasing software, documentation tools, and maybe some data transformation (from HTML to RestructuredText).
Requirements: In addition to knowledge of Python, knowledge of HTML and perhaps ReST would be useful.
Twisted currently has some bugs when used in certain non-English-configuration ("locales"), e.g. French. For example, date formatting might be wrong, or uppercase/lowercase conversion might work unexpectedly. As a first step you'd want to create a custom locale for Linux that was malicious about everything (e.g. lower-casing returns random unexpected bytes, dates are funky, etc.). This would be used to find places where Twisted is making US-centric assumptions, but would actually be a useful project for the Linux community in general. Then, fix resulting bugs in Twisted. Some relevant background material: http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-test.html
Requirements: This is probably easier to do on Linux than on Windows, so some basic familiarity with Linux, and a computer configured to use it, in addition to knowledge of Python.
* Finish half-done documentation: Merge existing documentation from elsewhere, e.g. [ticket:5474], or half-finished documentation that is in the tracker (there's the start of an IMAP howto, for example.) * For a particular subproject, review and improve existing examples and howtos and add missing documentation. Every example needs a description, e.g. http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/web/examples/index.html has descriptions but http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/names/examples/index.html doesn't. Every example should document its purpose, how it is run, and what it should do. Examples should use current coding and documentation standards and shouldn't use deprecated code. Documentation should use current coding and documentation standards in code snippets, and should use the preferred APIs. Some subprojects have very little documentation or examples and simply need more. Audit and update relevant man pages. * Coverage: For a particular subproject, go for 100% API documentation and unit test code coverage. * Test suite cleanup: overall test suite cleanup, remove deprecations, fix deprecation warnings, get to the bottom of and fix our various recurring Windows errors, fix Windows compiler warnings, fix non-deterministic tests. * Finish half-written code, documentation, bug fixes, etc.: We have >200 tickets that at some point had code written and received at least one code review, but for various reasons never made it in. This is a great way to learn because you don't have to start from scratch, and there's a variety of tasks (from minor fixes to documentation to new features) most of which have code reviews as a starting point. See http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/report/16 for a list. * PyPy: Have <a href="http://pypy.org" target="_blank">PyPy</a> be a fully supported platform, with all tests passing.
Here are some of the tools we use:
1. IRC 2. the Trac issue tracker 3. the svn revision control system 4. the diff and patch utilities
If you have not used IRC before, please go through this short tutorial on installing and using an IRC client: https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/UMD/Laptop_setup#Goal_.233:_install_an_IRC_client
Please familiarize yourself with how Twisted uses Trac by exploring the reports from this link: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/report
With sufficient exploration you should be able to answer the following questions (you don't have to tell me the answers, just make sure you know how to find them):
1. What is the oldest open Twisted ticket? 2. How many tickets are currently waiting on review? How do we denote tickets waiting on a review (hint: look at the keyword) 3. Using the custom query page at http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/query, find out how many open tickets we have that have the "documentation" keyword.
If you have not used svn before, please go through the svn training mission at: http://openhatch.org/missions/svn
If you have not used diff and patch before, please go through the diff and patch training mission at: http://openhatch.org/missions/diffpatch
If you have any questions while going through this material, don't hesitate to ask for help in #twisted on IRC or on the twisted-python mailing list.
Once you've gone through this material, the next steps will be to:
1. Meet up on IRC (stop by the #twisted channel) 2. Check out and explore the Twisted source code 3. Read a few parts of the Twisted core documentation and run some example Twisted scripts 4. Run the Twisted test suite - cd into the checkout folder and run "bin/trial twisted".
And then you'll be in great shape to start working on your first Twisted ticket. We'll suggest a first ticket when you get in touch over email; you'd want to fix it in your Twisted svn checkout, run `svn diff`, upload the resulting patch to the ticket and then add the "review" keyword to the ticket. This process is described in detail here: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedDevelopment#SubmittingaPatch