Sebastian Diaz is the GNU Motti maintainer, so I have closed the "Help Wanted" task asking for someone to maintain Motti.
I thought I'd post the current list of GNU
packages looking for maintainers in this channel
too, hopefully reaching some different people than
its other incarnations:
alive - auto login and keep-alive daemon
dr-geo - interactive work with geometric figures
fontutils - font conversion and processing utilities
gift, snakecharmer - image lookup, query by example
gleem - Java/C++ library of 3d widgets
gnatsweb - web interface for the gnats bug database
gnushogi - the game
goldwater - enterprise middleware
halifax - fax software
oleo - curses-based spreadsheet
pgccfd - the document "Porting GCC for Dunces"
polyxmass - mass spectrometry
quickthreads - low-level toolkit for building threads packages
rpge - role-playing game engine
sather - object-oriented language
vmslib - porting GNU packages to VMS
See the web pages at
http://www.gnu.org/software/PACKAGE for more
information.
In many cases, the authors/previous maintainers
are still around and willing to answer questions
or otherwise help.
If you're interested in any of these, please
review the general information about GNU packages
and being a GNU maintainer at
http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html#whatmeans
and then email maintainers@gnu.org with a bit
about your background and interest in the
particular project. Thanks.
There were only two tasks in it (along with a bunch of spam) - one was a test and the other was misplaced, so it's better to concentrate on servicing the mailing list and push as much activity as we can to it.
It's been 6 years since I added that task on Savannah, and years before that since there was any activity on that task so people who want to provide doc help to GCC should look at http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/documentation.html for tasks.
For many years we've had an entry on the games tasklist item for "A realistic train-driving simulator." I've found two projects that might satisfy this requirement: http://www.openttd.org/ (which is GPL licensed) and http://openbve.trainsimcentral.co.uk/ which is public domain. Both take different approaches to the idea of simulating train traffic, and both look pretty interesting in their own ways.
We used to have a job posting for volunteers to make a Free Software replacement for Google Earth. This is now an FSF High Priority project (see http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html#gereplacment) so there's no longer a need to duplicate it on this task list.
From the high priority projects page: "Ways to help.Develop or improve a 3D rendering engine that reads KML files on par with Google Earth. Contribute to free map data services such as the Open Street Maps project, and contribute to geographical map programs such as Marble."
http://www.openstreetmap.org/, http://edu.kde.org/marble/
For a very long time, the task list has had an item "If you're up for a "grand challenge" you can tackle a problem that's frustrated computer scientists and linguists for almost 40 years: translating one natural language into another." We recently learned about Apertium (http://www.apertium.org/) which appears to be making good progress on this task. If you're interested in natural language translation then we'd recommend that you take a look at Apertium.
I added a new task to the tasklist to improve the Free documentation for MySQL. The MySQL relational database is Free Software, but the documentation provided by MySQL AB is non-Free. There's a project to document MySQL at WikiBooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MySQL) and we encourage anyone that's interested in MySQL (or SQL in general) to contribute.
At rms' request I added a tasklist item asking for volunteers to work on a Free alternative to the proprietary "Google Earth" client. If you're interested in this project please let gvc@gnu.org know.
Both Harbour (http://www.harbour-project.org/) and Clip (http://www.itk.ru/english/index.shtml) seem to be humming along nicely, so people who need to run xBase/Clipper programs and want to use Free Software should be able to do so. I'm closing the Task List entry for xBase, if someone wants to work on it they could work on either of those projects.
Based on a volunteer query I looked into current support for the proprietary "Real Audio" format in Free Software. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealAudio) at least one GPL program (MPlayer) is capable of playing many "Real Audio" files, so I'm going to close this item and recommend that if volunteers are interested in helping GNU with media they should help with the GNASH project (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/) instead.
GNU is looking for volunteers to help manage (and contribute to) the "Hardware Devices that Support Free Software" pages. You can contribute simply by reporting your experience with various hardware components to hardware@fsf.org. If you'd like to contribute further you can join the team that manages the pages. The FSF website uses Plone so HTML skills aren't a necessity.
We've found a maintainer for the idutils package.
Mark Wielaard, the GNU Classpath maintainer writes:
I saw an interview with Richard Stallman were he said:
The GNU Project is working on development of free Java
libraries, and a lot of work is being done. But there's a lot
more to do, so we really want volunteers. Write to gvc@gnu.org
if you want to help.
http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=353
If people explicitly ask about helping out with the GNU Classpath and the gcc/gcj efforts please direct them to our mailinglist classpath@gnu.org. Our homepage http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/ has links to some open tasks and hacker documentation. And we have a site with content that help us coordinate some tasks and keep track of progress at http://developer.classpath.org/
The maintainer of GNU idutils has stepped down, so we're looking for another one. It's a program for maintaining a database of identifiers -- usually used for software, but can be used for other things. http://www.gnu.org/software/idutils/
We have had an item on the tasklist asking for a general-purpose document viewing program. I've just heard about "evince" http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince/ which looks like just the thing. It does PS, PDF, and DVI at the moment, and is designed to plug in additional back ends. So if you were interested in working on this task I'd recommend helping the evince developers.
Beltane is a PHP package for central management of the samhain file
integrity / intrusion detection system. Beltane V1 was released under
the GPL, and is now available at
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/freebeltane.
Unfortunately, the original authors decided to make Beltane V2 non-free.
Therefore, in the interests of the free software, we are looking for a
volunteer to actively maintain and improve the free version of Beltane.
If you're interested, please mail the volunteer coordinators at gvc@gnu.org.
A volunteer has come forward to maintain gperf. So we no longer need volunteers.
GV is a previewer for PostScript/PDF files, essentially a front end to Ghostscript. The maintainer would like to step down, so we're looking for someone to step up. For starters, just making a new release with updated documentation and framework files, and generally reinvigorating the project, would be very helpful, since it's been so many years since it was actively maintained. The gv 3.5.8 release from 1997 on Johannes' web page http://wwwthep.physik.uni-mainz.de/~plass/gv/ is still the current one. If you're interested please download the sources and get familiar with them, then email the volunteer coordinators at gvc@gnu.org.
The GNU Task List has had an entry asking for a C++ STL tutorial for a long time. "Taris" writes that the stlfreedoc project here on Savannah is working on just such a document. So I'd recommend that anyone who's interested in working on an STL document please take a look at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stlfreedoc and consider volunteering.