[DotGNU]Portable.NET Project List

[Rhys Weatherley]

I've received a lot of offers of help, but many of you have gotten a
little scared when you've seen just what is in the pnet tree.  However,
there is no need to be afraid.  It really isn't as complex as it may
appear.  And you don't have to be a VM or compiler expert to help out.

I've listed a number of smaller projects below that I need help with.
To help you out, I've listed what I believe to be the difficulty on
working on each one.

difficulty levels

    1 - Little programming skills, but a technical background.
    2 - Basic C skills, and no knowledge of IL, .NET, etc.
    3 - Good C skills, and familiarity with Internet file formats,
       conversion, and/or networking.  No knowledge of IL and .NET,
       is necessary.
    4 - Basic C skills, and a willingness to learn about IL, .NET, etc.
       No knowledge of VM's, compilers, etc, are necessary.
    5 - Good C skills, and experience with VM and compiler
implementation.

documentation proof reading and writing

    The texinfo documentation for the tools and API's need to be
    proof-read for mistakes.  There are also missing pieces in
    the API documentation that we could use help with.

    Difficulty: 1, good documentation skills

.po support for resgen

    The resgen program converts resources between various formats:
    text, XML, binary formats, etc.  I would like someone to add
    support for the GNU gettext .po format.

    Adding a new format to resgen should be very easy, and the .po
    format is very simple to parse and generate.  If you have a
    GNU/Linux system, then "info gettext" will give you information
    on the format.

    It isn't necessary to understand .NET, IL, etc, to do this.
    You should also be able to borrow a lot of the existing text
    format routines to help you.

    Difficulty: 2, familiarity with line-based text parsing.

documentation tools

    The "csdoc" program extracts C# documentation from source code
    and writes it out as an XML document.  The "csdoc2*" programs
    convert this XML format into documentation in other formats:
    texinfo, HTML, etc.

    The "csdoc" directory contains a set of routines that loads
    the XML document into memory, and allows you to walk around the
    data structures.  We need back-ends for texinfo and HTML,
    and any other formats that you are interested in supporting.

    Difficulty: 3, familiarity with XML and format conversion.

ildiff

    It would be nice if there were a tool that compared two versions
    of an IL library and reported any differences between them.  For
    example, "class C added", "method C::M deleted", etc.  This would
    help us track down functionality in the C# system library that
    we haven't fully implemented yet.

    Start with "ilsize" and "ilnative" to see how to load IL libraries
    into memory and walk through the classes and methods.

    Difficulty: 4, willingness to learn the internals of IL.

Cheers,

Rhys.