GNU Task List
Free Software Foundation
last updated June 8, 2000
Table of Contents
If you did not obtain this file directly from the GNU project and
recently, please check for a newer version. You can ftp the task list
from any GNU FTP host in directory `/pub/gnu/tasks/'. The task
list is available there in several different formats: `tasks.text',
`tasks.texi', `tasks.info', and `tasks.dvi'. The GNU
HURD task list is also there in file `tasks.hurd'.
The task list is also available on the GNU World Wide Web server:
http://www.gnu.org/prep/tasks_toc.html.
If you start working steadily on a project, please let gvc@gnu.org
know. We might have information that could help you; we'd also like to
send you the GNU coding standards.
Because of the natural tendency for most volunteers to write programming
tools or programming languages, we have a comparative shortage of
applications useful for non-programmer users. Therefore, we ask you to
consider writing such a program.
Typically, a new program that does a completely new job advances
the GNU project, and the free software community, more than an
improvement to an existing program.
Typically, new features or new programs advance the free software
community more, in the long run, than porting existing programs. One
reason is that portable new features and programs benefit people on many
platforms, not just one. At the same time, there tend to be many
volunteers for porting--so your help will be more valuable in other
areas, where volunteers are more scarce.
Typically, it is more useful to extend a program in functionality than
to improve performance. Users who use the new functionality will
appreciate it very much, if they use it; but even when they benefit from
a performance improvement, they may not consider it very important.
Finally, if you think of an important job that free software cannot
solve yet that is typically solved by proprietary software, please send
a short description of that job to gnu@gnu.org so that we can
add it to this task list.
This task list mentions a large number of tasks that would be more or
less useful. With luck, at least one of them will inspire you to start
writing. It's better for you to work on any task that inspires you than
not write free software at all.
But if you would like to work on what we need most, here is a list of
high priority projects.
-
If you are good at writing documentation, please do that.
-
If you are very good at C programming and interested in kernels, you can
help develop the GNU HURD, the kernel for the GNU system. Please have a
look at http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html, and
then get a copy of the latest HURD task list from:
-
If you are a Scheme fan, you can help develop Guile. Please have a look
at the URL http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html
and then contact the Guile developers at guile@gnu.org.
-
A package to convert programs written using MS Access into Scheme,
making use of a free data base system and the GTK toolkit.
-
Help develop software to emulate Windows NT on top of GNU systems.
For example, you could help work on Willows Twin.
See http://www.willows.com/.
-
Add gettext support to GNU programs that don't have it already. (Please
contact the developers of the specific packages that you want to work
on.)
-
Develop a substitute, which runs on GNU systems, for some very popular
or very important application that many non-programmers use on Windows,
and which has no comparable free equivalent now.
We very urgently need documentation for many existing parts of the
system.
Note that there are proprietary manuals for many of these topics, but
proprietary manuals do not count, for the same reason proprietary
software does not count: we are not free to copy and modify them.
We do not recommend any non-free materials as documentation.
-
A manual for libstdc++.
-
A unified manual for LaTeX. (Existing documentation is non-free.)
-
A manual for Docbook SGML format.
-
A tutorial introduction to Midnight Commander.
-
A thorough manual for RCS.
-
A reference manual for Mach.
-
A reference manual for the GNU Hurd features in GNU libc.
-
A manual for writing Hurd servers.
-
A manual for GNU sed.
-
Reference manuals for C++, Objective C, Pascal, Fortran 77, and Java.
-
A tutorial manual for the C++ STL (standard template library).
-
A tutorial manual for Gforth.
-
GNU Objective-C Runtime Library Manual; this would be a reference manual
for the runtime library functions, structures, and classes. Some work
has been done on this job.
-
Manuals for GNUstep: developer tutorial, developer programming manual,
developer reference manual, and user manual.
-
A manual for Ghostscript.
-
A manual for TCSH.
-
A coherent free reference manual for Perl. Most of the Perl on-line
reference documentation can be used as a starting point, but work is
needed to weld them together into a coherent manual.
-
A manual for PIC (the graphics formatting language).
-
A book on how GCC works and why various machine descriptions
are written as they are.
-
A manual for programming applications for X11.
-
Manuals for various X window managers.
-
Reference cards for those manuals that don't have them: C
Compiler, Make, Texinfo, Termcap, and maybe the C Library.
-
Many utilities need documentation, including
grep and others.
-
Less urgent: make a replacement for the "writer's workbench" program
style, or something to do the same kind of job. Compatibility
with Unix is not especially important for this program.
-
Rewrite
indent from scratch to make it cleaner.
-
An over-the-ethernet debugger stub that will allow the kernel to be
debugged from GDB running on another machine.
This stub needs its own self-contained implementation of all protocols
to be used, since the GNU system will use user processes to implement
all but the lowest levels, and the stub won't be able to use those
processes. If a simple self-contained implementation of IP and TCP is
impractical, it might be necessary to design a new, simple protocol
based directly on ethernet. It's not crucial to support high speed or
communicating across gateways.
It might be possible to use the Mach ethernet driver code, but it would
need some changes.
-
A shared memory X11 server to run under MACH is very desirable. The
machine specific parts should be kept well separated.
-
An implementation of CIFS, the "Common Internet File System," for the
HURD. This protocol is an offshoot of SMB.
-
Support (in Linux?) for dumping the non-textual contents of an SVGA
console.
-
Enhance GCC. See files `PROJECTS' and `PROBLEMS' in the GCC
distribution.
-
Interface GDB to Guile, so that users can write debugging commands in
Scheme. This would also make it possible to write, in Scheme, a
graphical interface that uses GTK and is tightly integrated into GDB.
-
Extend Octave to support programs that were written
to run on Khoros.
-
Rewrite Automake in Scheme, so it can run in Guile. Right now it is
written in Perl. There are also other programs, not terribly long,
which we would also like to have rewritten in Scheme.
-
Finish the partially-implemented C interpreter project.
-
Help with the development of GNUstep, a GNU implementation of the
OpenStep specification.
-
Add features to GNU Make to record the precise rule with which each file
was last recompiled; then recompile any file if its rule in the makefile
has changed.
-
Add a few features to GNU
diff, such as handling large input
files without reading entire files into core.
-
An
nroff macro package to simplify texi2roff.
-
A queueing system for the mailer Smail that groups pending work by
destination rather than by original message. This makes it possible
to schedule retries coherently for each destination. Talk to
tron@veritas.com about this.
Smail also needs a new chief maintainer.
-
Enhanced cross-reference browsing tools. (We now have something at
about the level of
cxref.) We also could use something like
ctrace. (Some people are now working on this project.)
-
An emulator for Macintosh graphics calls on top of X Windows.
-
A package that emulates the API of Visual C++, but operates on top of
X11. It need not match the screen appearance of Visual C++. Instead,
it would be best to use GTK, so as to give coherence with GNOME.
-
An ear-training program for students of music.
-
A program to edit dance notation (such as labanotation) and display
dancers moving on the screen.
-
Make sure the Vibrant toolkit works with LessTif instead of Motif.
-
A program to display and edit Hypercard stacks.
-
A two-dimensional outliner program, which lets you draw
graph structures of textual items, and then display them
in various ways.
-
Software for designing and printing business cards.
These projects need to be written outside the US by people who are not
US citizens, to avoid problems with US export control law.
-
A free library for public-key encryption.
This library should use the Diffie-Helman algorithm for public key
encryption, not the RSA algorithm, because the Diffie-Helman patent in
the US expired in 1997. This library can probably be developed from
the code for the GNU Privacy Guard (now in development).
-
An implementation of SSLv3 (more precisely, TLSv1) which is patent-free
(uses the non-RSA algorithms) and has distribution terms compatible with
the GNU GPL. We know of a GPL-covered implementation of a version of SSL
that you can use as a starting point.
-
Free software for doing secure commercial transactions on the web.
This too needs public key encryption.
If you think of others that should be added, please
send them to gnu@gnu.org.
-
An imitation of Page Maker or Ventura Publisher.
-
An imitation of
dbase2 or dbase3. (How dbased!)
Harbour, a free replacement for Clipper, would provide a useful start.
http://www.harbour-project.org/.
-
A free replacement for Glimpse, which is not free software.
-
Software for desktop publishing. We are extending Emacs into a WYSIWYG
word processor, to handle primarily linear text; what this item proposes
is software focused on page layout.
-
High-quality music compression software.
(Talk with mt@sulaco.org for relevant suggestions.)
Unfortunately we cannot implement the popular MP3 format
due to patents, so this job includes working out some other
non-patented format and compression method.
-
A program to play sound distributed in "Real Audio" format.
-
A program to generate "Real Audio" format from audio input.
-
Programs to handle audio in RTSP format.
-
A braille translation and formatting system which can convert marked up
documents into braille. This should let the user customize the braille
translation rules; it would be good to divide it into a
device-independent part plus drivers. Contact Jason White,
jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU.
-
More scientific mathematical subroutines.
(A clone of SPSS is being written already.)
-
A scientific data collection and processing tool,
perhaps something like Scientific Workbench and/or Khoros,
-
A program to calculate properties of molecules by solving
the Schroedinger equation.
-
Software to replace card catalogs in libraries.
-
A simulator for heating and air conditioning systems for buildings.
-
A package for editing genealogical records conveniently.
This could perhaps be done as a Gnome program, or perhaps
as an Emacs extension.
-
Grammar and style checking programs.
-
A diagnostic program to test a hard disk.
-
Optical character recognition programs; especially if suitable for
scanning documents with multiple fonts and capturing font info as well
as character codes. Work is being done on this, but more help is needed.
-
A program to scan a line drawing and convert it to Postscript.
-
A program to recognize handwriting.
-
A program that can translate from one natural language, into another.
For example, a program to translate French into English.
-
A pen based interface.
-
CAD software, such as a vague imitation of Autocad.
-
A program to receive data from a serial-line tap to facilitate the
reverse-engineering of communication protocols.
Volunteers are needed to write parsers/front ends for languages such as
Algol 60, Algol 68, PL/I, Cobol, Fortran 90, Delphi, Modula 2, Modula 3,
RPG, and any other languages designed for compilation, to be used with
the code generation phases of the GNU C compiler.
You can get the status of the Fortran front end with this command:
finger -l fortran@gnu.org
We would like to have translators from various languages into Scheme.
These languages include TCL, Python, Perl, Java, Javascript, and Rexx.
Perhaps Clipper as well.
Video-oriented games that work with the X window system.
-
Empire (there is a free version but it needs upgrading)
-
An "empire builder" system that makes it easy to write various kinds of
simulation games.
-
Improve GnuGo, which is not yet very sophisticated.
-
Network servers and clients for board and card games for which such
software does not yet exist.
-
A Hierarchical Task Network package which can be used
to program play the computer's side in various strategic games.
-
A game like Mill/Nine Men's Morris.
-
Write imitations of some popular video games:
-
Space war, Asteroids, Pong, Columns.
-
Defending cities from missiles.
-
Plane shoots at lots of other planes, tanks, etc.
-
Wizard fights fanciful monsters.
-
A golf game.
-
Biomorph evolution (as in Scientific American and The Blind
Watchmaker).
We do not need rogue, as we have hack.
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