GNU Task List

Free Software Foundation last updated May 6, 1999

1 About the GNU Task List

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 nonprogrammer 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.

2 Highest Priority

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:

     • http://www.gnu.org/prep/tasks.hurd.html, via the World Wide Web.
     • ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/tasks/tasks.hurd, via anonymous FTP.
     • gnu@gnu.org via e-mail.

• 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 de-
    velopers 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 XmHTML. See http://www.xs4all.nl/~ripley/XmHTML/.

• 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/.

• Implement the Kermit data transfer protocol. (See below.)

• 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.

3 Documentation

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 man-

uals 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 unified manual for LaTEX. (Existing documentation is non-free.)

• A tutorial introduction to Midnight Commander.

• A manual for GNU SQL.

• 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.

• Reference manuals for C++, Objective C, Pascal, Fortran 77, and Java.

• A tutorial manual for the C++ STL (standard template library).

• 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 good free Perl language tutorial introduction. The existing Perl introductions are published with restrictions on copying and modification, so that they cannot be part of a GNU system.

• 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.

4 Unix-Related Projects

• A grap preprocessor program for troff.

• 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 programs.

5 Kernel-Related Projects

• 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.

6 Extensions to Existing GNU Software

• 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.

• An implementation of XML (see http://www.w3.org/XML/).

• 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.)

7 X Windows Projects

• 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.

• A compatible replacement for Visual Basic, running 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.

• A music playing and editing system. This should work with LilyPond, a GNU program for music typesetting.

• An ear-training program for students of music.

• An ephemeris program to replace xephem (which is, alas, too restricted to qualify as free software).

• 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 program for graphic morphing of scanned photographs.

• Software for designing and printing business cards.

8 Network Projects

• A free ICQ-compatible server program. (The ICQ server itself is not free software.)

9 Encryption Projects

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 implemention 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.

The projects to provide free replacements for PGP and SSH are no longer listed here, because projects to do those jobs are well under way.

10 Other Projects

If you think of others that should be added, please send them to gnu@gnu.org.

• A free program that can transfer files on a serial line using the same protocol that Kermit uses.

• An imitation of Page Maker or Ventura Publisher.

• An imitation of dbase2 or dbase3 (How dbased!)

• A general ledger program, including support for accounts payable, account receivables, payroll, inventory control, order processing, etc.

• 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.

• A program to reformat HTML source to make it easier to read as HTML.

• High-quality music compression software. (Talk with phr@netcom.com 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.)

• Statistical tools.

• A scientific data collection and processing tool, perhaps something like Scientific Workbench and/or Khoros,

• Software to replace card catalogues 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 extentsion.

• A project-scheduling package that accepts a list of project sub-tasks with their interdependencies, and generates Gantt charts and Pert charts and all the other standard project progress reports.

• Grammar and style checking programs.

• A fast emulator for the i386, which would make it possible to emulate x86 code on other CPUs, and also to more easily debug kernels such as Linux more conveniently. To make this faster, it could work by translating machine instructions into the machine language of the host machine.

• 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 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.

11 Programming Languages

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.

We would like to have an implementation of Clipper, perhaps a GCC front end, and perhaps a translator into Scheme.

12 Games and Recreations

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.

• 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).

- A program to display effects of moving at relativistic speeds. We do not need rogue, as we have hack.

Table of Contents

1 About the GNU Task List. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 Highest Priority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 Documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4 Unix-Related Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 5 Kernel-Related Projects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 6 Extensions to Existing GNU Software . . . . . . . 3 7 X Windows Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 8 Network Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 9 Encryption Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 10 Other Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 11 Programming Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 12 Games and Recreations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7