Interest in strace [was: Re: Google Summer of Code 2015 strace participation]

[Philippe Ombredanne]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 3:54 PM, Alangi Derick <alangiderick at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am Alangi Derick Ndimnain. I am a third year undergraduate software
> engineering student i did a course called systems programming which talks
> about the notion of systems call. I will really like to work with system
> calls and implement some of them. I will like you to work me through so that
> i can contribute some code to the organisation because i think i have some
> ideas i can chip in to the organisation in order to increase their code base
> and improve on Strace as a whole. I will also like you to mentor me as your
> student and i will work with you based on your idea or domain of specialty.
> Thanks and will be waiting for your mail what will lead me to get
> involved in Strace.

Alangi:
Welcome: thank you for your interest, this is very much appreciated!
strace is a cool codebase, but this is also fairly low level C code.

To get involved you should start by installing it and using it of
course, then studying it.
Do you have some experience with C and Linux system code?
Some public code that you did in that domain that you can point us to?
Do you have some understanding of multiple processor architectures?

Now, if you want to be involved in the GSOC, the process is roughly this:

1. Participate to the list and start contributing to strace here and now.
A small patch or bug fix would go a long way to show your capabilities.
We generally follow the same approach and conventions as the Linux
Kernel for mailing list and patch submissions.
Ask questions (but please do your research and homework first!).

2. When the GSOC starts in earnest, you can then submit a project
proposal for the strace project @ Google.
This is a highly competitive process where all the student project
proposals will be evaluated carefully and we will only select a few of
the very best proposals.

If you do not care for the GSOC in particular, 1. is enough! and you
can start right away.

As a side note, we do not use top posting on the strace mailing list.
We use bottom posting when we reply to emails. Please do not top post.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Bottom-posting for details.
This email is a simple example of such a bottom post reply.

-- 
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne