Hi,

As some of you may already know, I'm interested in applying for Google's
Summer of Code.  My first idea was to work on implementing an in-kernel
HFS+ filesystem, but another person has claimed interest in this item.
I certainly don't mind working on another project, as long as that one
is done ;)  There is so many stuff to work on...

So, while reviewing the list of possible projects, I had another idea
(completely unrelated to that one) which is not listed.  (In fact, what
I'll describe below is something I started to do two years ago or so
but never got into an usable status; no, that code is not usable as a
base for the new one.)

The idea could be to create a ui-agnostic library to manage pkgsrc: that
is, walk the tree; install, deinstall and build packages; update all
installed packages to their latest versions ("a la apt-get"), etc.

The project could also include the creation of two main frontends: one
for the console, similar to "apt-get", and a graphical one, where you
could quickly view what's installed and do any of the tasks described
above.  (Sometimes I'm lazy and I'd like to be able to point&click to
manage the packages.)

The library itself would interact with make and the pkg_* tools to keep
things as they are already.

Furthermore, I think that this project is correctly sized for a
two-month period.  (Not as the filesystem one, because getting something
good could surely take more time, given my actual knowledge in that
area (~zero).)

So... what do you think about this project?  Do you think it'd be worth
the effort?  Or should I think about something else?

Thanks,

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com>
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jmmv/
The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/