The official 2023 ideas page has a gmane.org link for some early work on porting Virtualbox. gmane is gone for a number of years now
(seperately, for future years ideas lists - is XMPP actually used for anything anymore? OTT messaging apps on phones, plus Facebook, have basically killed the old IM apps as far as I can tell. I’d also wonder if PPP is as important now as it was whenever it was added to the list? I know even very modern VDSL kit uses PPPoE but you aren’t going to be doing it from a PC very often)
I use XMPP for most of my internet chat, I don’t rely on anything closed source from Google or Facebook or the like if I can avoid it.
As for PPP, well, you can’t assume anything, it’s mostly gone from western EU and the US but can we be so sure about other countries? And if a GSoC contributor wants to do it for fun and retrocomputing, why not?
Who decides that? They are both very active, XMPP is developped by an independant fundation with many projects implementing it, while Matrix has a “fundation” but it is actually developped and funded by only one company (Element) with other clients just following the spec. It also has many preference problems, in particular with large rooms.
XMPP is also used a lot outside of the instant messaging part, as a more generic protocol like MQTT. Instant messaging is just the most well known application, and even there, some people use it without connecting to the main XMPP network (for example, to implement chat inside MMORPG games, where there is no point to join outside XMPP channels).
Matrix may have more marketing budget but that does not make it more actual.
Anyway, if someone is interested in mentoring a GSoC contributor for making a Matrix client, we can add that to the list too. But I’m not adding ideas without a mentor to back them up.
We had students working on (native) WebKit with reasonable success, and hopefully we will have more. Not sure if we want to put effort into QtWebKit (as usual, unless someone who knows qtwebkit offers to mentor…)
For now we have 1 mentor for GSoC so I’m not sure what we will do with so many ideas.
Virtual volume. A disk on the desktop where you can upload files that are encrypted or compressed on the fly. The resulting data is saved in a partition file (e.g. dynamic Virtualbox’s HDD file) on the native disk.
This worked flawlessly during my tests on a recent 64bit nightly. I used a self-compiled version from the github repo, maybe there’s a difference to the version in the haikuports repo. I’ll do another test with the version installed via pkgman. Which Haiku version are you on?
Since we are really getting off-topic here, can an admin please split the PonyExpress related posts to a separate topic?
How about developing a native ActivityPub (Mastodon, Akkoma, Misskey, etc.) client? ActivityPub at a glance seems to be implementable fairly easily compared to some federated protocols, designing a microblogging UI in the Haiku style could be interesting, and the Fediverse is a hot topic in technology frequently lately.
Prototype methods of retrofitting Haiku with “capability based security” which has become popular in subsequent “built from scratch” operating systems.
