[Etoile-dev] Some interesting Summer of Code projects

[David Chisnall]

There are three interesting projects that I have come across as part  
of the Google Summer of Code that may be worthwhile to use as  
building blocks for an Étoilé system:

1) Zeroconfd from NetBSD.  A BSD-licensed zeroconf implementation.   
Could be a nice basis for implementing ZeroConf/Rendezvous/Bonjour/ 
Nom de jour services from.

2) HFS+ support in NetBSD.  At the moment, I can think of two proven  
filesystems with good meta-data support.  BFS and HFS+.  Both have a  
very different approach - BFS is better for browsing, HFS+ is better  
for searching metadata (BFS requires indexes to be manually created)  
and although BFS is a simpler and perhaps more robust design, HFS+  
would be an interesting filesystem to use for an Étoilé system - even  
if we were to be putting Étoilé data in a database back-end, an HFS+  
system would be nice for allowing arbitrary data to be tagged to  
files saved by non-Étoilé apps.

3) Launchd for FreeBSD.  FreeBSD would be a better choice for a base  
system than Darwin, both for performance and driver support, and this  
would allow Étoilé to make use of Darwin's Launchd on other platforms.