Spawn support in pkgsrc tools - Google Summer of Code 2016

[Andreas Theodosiou <andreas%atheod.net@localhost>]

Greetings,

I am a second year Engineering student, planning to specialise in
Electrical and Information Sciences, at the University of Cambridge. I
am writing to let the community know of my desire to contribute to the
project via Google Summer of Code 2016. I would like to take on the
"Spawn support in pkgsrc tools" project as listed on the ideas page at
"https://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/pkgsrc_spawn_support/";.

The aim of this project will be to implement posix_spawn support in
pkgsrc tools such as:
* devel/bmake
* shells/pdksh
* NetBSD base make
* NetBSD sh
* NetBSD base ksh

Upon implementation of posix_spawn in the aforementioned tools, the
performance of posix_spawn in these tools will be evaluated and compared
to the traditional way of launching processes (fork and then clone with
an exec-family function).

I have a rich experience with Unix-like OS's like NetBSD, FreeBSD,
Archlinux, and Fedora and I would love an opportunity to contribute to
such a historic project such as NetBSD.

I have in the past worked with open source communities where I
contributed packages to the Archlinux User Repository (AUR), a very
small patch to the Linux kernel, and helped with QGRUBEditor. I am
experienced with version control software, primarily git and willing to
learn new tools so as to contribute to NetBSD. I have also worked on
personal projects in languages such as C, C++, Python and SML. Some
of my work can be found at my website http://wwww.atheod.net.

I would really like to hear some feedback on this project so that I can
work further on developping a full project proposal. I would greatly
appreciate an opportunity to contribute to the community.

Yours sincerely,

Andreas Theodosiou