Project ideas

Please read our philosophy for background information.

Peer review

The suckless.org community will act as a rigid reviewer of the progress.

General ideas

Our project ideas in general intend to focus on our innovative development environment from bare hardware to the graphical interface.

Idiomatic interfaces for developers (such as more advanced concepts for mail clients, messaging clients, music players, text editors).
Simple protocol interfaces for developers.
General userland enhancements to UNIX-like operating systems.
Foundations of a new windowing system for UNIX-like operating systems.
Improvements to our existing software projects and infrastructure.
Replacements of bloated existing software and libraries in a suckless way.

Current small tasks

Write a gopher back-end using build-page.c: https://git.suckless.org/sites/file/build-page.c.html This should use the geomyidae gopher server and the gph output format. Difficulty: medium-rare.
Fix broken patches on the wiki. Difficulty: trivial-medium.
See: https://gunther.suckless.org/patches/
Fix broken links on the wiki. Difficulty: trivial.
See: https://git.suckless.org/sites/file/checklinks.sh.html
Fix typos and formatting errors on the wiki. Difficulty: trivial.

Concrete ideas

The listed ideas generally require good knowledge of C and experience with UNIX-like operating systems. The difficulty ranges from medium to high.

Suckless font rendering library

There is libdrw in suckless now, which still uses xft and fontconfig. Fontconfig and xft are ugly and require too much internal knowledge to be useful. The next logical layer evolved as pango and cairo. Both of course added HTML formatting and vector drawing. This is not needed to simply draw some text somewhere. And this is what a suckless font rendering library should do: Give it a font string and render at some position the given font without having to care about font specifics.

Requirements: C knowledge, some X11 knowledge and of course knowledge about the font formats and how to handle them.

Write ld wrapper or replacement for static linking

The GNU autotools such as automake and autoconf are completely unusable in non-chroot'ed cross-compile environments and often completely fail to produce statically linked libraries or executables. Also they are extremely slow and bloated.

The stali build system is not using autotools for good reason, however many UNIX/Linux open source packages do. To create statically linked libraries out of the ld arguments we need an ld wrapper or re-implementation that creates static libraries or executables. This would enable us to build static libraries and executables out of any automake generated makefiles without the need to write make replacements or patching the build system of a particular package.

The ld wrapper needs to be extended to also link against uclibc first and if that fails to fallback to glibc, in order to produce smaller executables in the general case.

Requirements: Good C/UNIX knowledge is essential, knowledge about linking/linker internals are desirable.

Write a decent mailing list Web archive system

All web archive systems such as hypermail, pipermail, etc. have plenty drawbacks and are quite out-dated. This task requires to write a completely new web mailing list archiving tool that follows the thread view concepts found in the mutt MUA and which is designed with low footprint and efficiency in mind.

We expect this tool as a stand-alone UNIX tool written in C or shell. To get started you could use Dovecot to produce a sanitized structure:

printf "1 select inbox\n2 thread references us-ascii all\n3 fetch 1:*
envelope\n4 logout\n" |
/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap  2>/dev/null

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html

Requirements: Good C/Shell/HTML knowledge would be desirable. Must not use JavaScript.

Write cookie handler for surf

The biggest disadvantage of surf is sloppy cookie handling. libwebkit and libsoup (which are used for HTTP) were never designed to run in multiple processes simultaneously.

This task requires writing a new cookie handler in surf which:

creates a nice human-readable cookie file
is able to run in multiple concurrent processes

Requirements: Good knowledge of C and POSIX file locking. Basic knowledge of GTK and its other evil friends.

Gopher services

Gopher is a sane protocol which has hierarchy in its design. It allows the abstraction of a mass of information in a filesystem. The goal of this meta project is to find ideas how to implement gopher services to easily access the web and new information.

See the protocol for how easy it is to write a menu, which can be seen as a directory.

Anyone creating a gopher interface to suckless.org will get a bonus.

Requirements: Just some shell scripting and a way to setup a gopher daemon is required. Everyone can do this.

A sane backend for surf

There is dillo, netsurf and abaco which implement HTML. The problem is JavaScript and extensions to replace webkit as the big dependency hell for web rendering in surf.

If you prepare to work on this project, plan ahead in recruiting more developers. You will need them.

Requirements: Very good C knowledge, a very good knowledge in web standards and how to strip them down to the suckless level. Difficulty level: Probably impossible.