GSoC Questions

[Mohammed Gamal <f2c2001 at yahoo dot com>]

Salamz Everyone,
I am intending to join Google Summer of Code this year, and of course one of
the projects I'd be really interested in getting involved with is Arabeyes.
I am particularly interested in Siragi, libarabic, ITL, and BiCon. However,
I've got some questions regarding these projects:

- Siragi:
  This is one big project, and I didn't see any clear ideas about how it should
be involved in GSoC. In other words, how should I -as a student- get involved
with the project? What does it need? and what does it miss that can be
implemented within GSoC's three-month time frame?

- libarabic:
  I would be interested in working on normalization in libarabic, despite of my
humble knowledge on that matter and on i18n in general - I am willing to learn
though ;). But how should we deal with the absence of a standard on
normalization, should we get over this and present our very own implementation?

- ITL
  I've seen in the wiki that ITL needs to be ported to other languages. I like
this idea very much as it suits GSoC ideally. It doesn't seem so hard and is
doable within 3 months. But I have a few stupid questions here:
 * What is exactly meant by porting? Should the whole code be ported to other
languages, or should we simply implement bindings to them?
 * Should the student port to more than one language, or is one language enough
? (For myself, I would like to do that with Java and/or PHP)

- BiCon
 I've use BiCon myself before and I recall it had some bugs. While I'd have
been interested in attempting some bug squashing, documentation, and providing
packages for a handful of distros, but these don't seem very good as project
proposals. So my question is what features do you think can be
added/enhanced/fixed in BiCon? Unfortunately the project page isn't too
informative in this regard, so what'd be your input on this?

I am sorry for bombarding you with a long series of stupid questions, so I hope
I didn't bother you.

Regards,
Mohammed

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