Contact information

• Your Name: Paulo Romulo Alves Barros

• Email Address: p.romuloo@gmail.com

• IRC nickname: promulo

• GSoC LinkID: romullo

• Launchpad ID: p-romuloo

• Skype username: p.romulo

• College-University: Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil

• Major: Computer Science

Open Source

• Please describe any previous Open Source development experience:

I work at Embedded Systems and Pervasive Computing Lab, which encourages the open-source software development, focused on the mobile computing context (in partnership with INdT – Nokia Institute of Technology, in Brazil). I have experience with C++, Python and Java programming languages and I have contributed with Maemo community in the context of ESbox and PluThon projects.

• Why are you interested in Open Source?

Well, it's all about freedom :-). Here in my university, the students have contact with the open source world since the beginning, and because of that I knew KDE and Kubuntu, so since then (about 4 years ago) I have became an user and an enthusiast.

Availability

• How long will the project take? When can you begin work?

I think that 3 months are enough. I can start as soon as Google release the accepted projects for this year.

• How much time do you expect to have for this project? (weekly)

30~40 hours.

• Where will you based during the summer?

Brazil (UTC -3)

Other

• Do you have any commitments for the summer? (holidays/work/summer courses)

My only commitment is with the masters course. Since the laboratory where I work encourages the collaboration with the open-source community, there is an agreement between me and my advisor about my participation on the program. There will be no conflicts of activities.

• Have you ever participated in a previous GSoC?

No. I have applied last year for the KDE project, but the proposal was not accepted.

• Have you applied for any other 2010 Summer of Code projects? If yes, which ones?

Yes, for the KDE project.

• Why did you apply for the Google Summer of Code ?

The program is a great opportunity to know high skilled people from other countries and show to the world the power of the open-source community.

• Why did you choose Ubuntu as a mentoring organisation?

I have used other distros along the years and nothing is like (K)Ubuntu. The KDE 4 series fits perfectly with the system and I think that the duo KDE/Ubuntu will evolve more and more over the years, always bringing to the users a stable, beautiful and easy-to-use system.

• Why do you want to participate and why should Ubuntu choose you?

My personal goal in participating of the Google Summer of Code is to contribute with the diffusion of KDE and Kubuntu, improve my knowledge about it as a developer and put some of my code in the project :-). Ubuntu should choose me because (i) I'm motivated to deal with most experienced developers; (ii) I have facility and will to learn new things; and (iii) I want to initiate a career as a open-source developer, and my intent is to contribute more after the SoC.

• Why did you like this idea?

I have interest in the computer networks area (my masters work is related, too), and providing a good integration with SMB environments can turn Kubuntu more interoperable with DOS/Windows systems. Another motivation to do this project is that this kind of feature is widely used, so my contribution would reach many Kubuntu users.

Project

Summary

• Project Name: Kubuntu File Sharing

• Project Description: Kubuntu does not support simple file sharing for modern releases of Samba. The project main goals are to update the SMB file sharing to use the "net share" command, to create a WebDav file sharing daemon and a UI (in Qt).

Implementation Details

In order to achieve these goals the project will be divided in two phases. On the first phase it's necessary to review and rework on the current implementation of SMB sharing through KDE. The current way is to use and maintain a configuration file (smb.conf), which require root privileges. The use of net utility functions can make the basic file sharing an easy task from a user point of view. This can be made through the creation of a new "Share" tab on Dolphin's folder properties dialog, which will offer a "share folder" option along with parameters like name and comment and checkboxes to configure the read/write permissions. A typical use case of this feature is that where the user has music on a shared folder, and wishes to access them from any computer on the network, rather than copy them to each computer.

The second phase of the project aims the development of a daemon and a KDE/Qt UI for WebDav file sharing. WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning". It is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers. This UI could be attached in a new KControl module and/or integrated in an "Advanced" option into the "Share" tab of Dolphin's folder properties dialog.

More implementation issues can be viewed in the specification page created by Roderick Greening.

Tentative Timeline

The tentative timeline can be seen in the following table:

After SoC

I think that the project cannot end after the GSoC. Since is my intention to contribute much more with Kubuntu, these following tasks can be assigned as future work:

• Zeroconf integration
• NFS sharing
• UPnP sharing