# What Needs Doing?

There are a lot of different things you can do to help Subversion. Not all involve coding; there are plenty of non-programming roles for eager volunteers.

Below are some of the needs we've identified, but please don't take these as gospel! New volunteers bring fresh viewpoints, and one of the most important things you can do is point out a need we hadn't recognized before — and then fill it.

## Information Management Tasks

These are non-coding tasks, so if you arrived here from the Google Summer of Code pages, please skip to later sections.

### Issue Management

Do we need an Issue Manager? Maybe...

The Subversion bug database has been managed in a rather ad hoc fashion thus far. Periodically we make sweeps over all outstanding issues and try to prioritize them, organize them into scheduled milestones, note dependencies between issues, etc. These methods have been moderately successful up till now, but they are not scaling well as the number of issues grows. Since issue growth is proportional to user base growth, the issue tracker is becoming a victim of Subversion's success. We need to find new ways of managing our issues, ways that do not involve making O(N) sweeps over the entire list of open issues at regular intervals.

While we have some semi-formalized management roles (patch manager, release manager, etc), we have never had an issue manager. It might be time to get one, though. It's not yet clear whether the problem is mainly one of attention, or of algorithm, or both, but having someone dedicated to managing the issues database couldn't hurt. One thing such a person could do would be to go through the list of outstanding issues, figure out which ones are likely to be bite-sized tasks, and mark them as such, so that other volunteers have an easier time choosing things to work on. We've already marked various issues as bite-sized, but we haven't done so consistently as new issues come in. This means there are a lot of potential entry points to the project going unnoticed. Want to help us solve that?

Creative ideas welcome! If you'd like to help with this, please subscribe to the dev@subversion.tigris.org mailing list and post your thoughts.

### FAQ Management

We need a FAQ manager. A FAQ manager is someone who stays subscribed to the users@subversion.tigris.org and dev@subversion.tigris.org mailing lists, watches for common questions or addenda to existing questions, and slowly adjusts the Subversion FAQ in response to the problems users are having "in the wild". This is also a great way to get familiar with Subversion usage patterns and common problems. If you use or administrate Subversion anyway, helping to manage the FAQ is a great way to expand your troubleshooting skills.

Again, creative ideas are most welcome. Please post to the dev@subversion.tigris.org mailing list if you're interested in this.

## Bite-Sized Coding Tasks

The Subversion bug database contains many issues classified as "bite-sized" tasks — tasks that are well-defined and self-contained, and thus suitable for a volunteer looking to get involved with the project. You don't need broad or detailed knowledge of Subversion's design to take on one of these, just a pretty good idea of how things generally work, and familiarity with the coding guidelines in the Hacker's Guide to Subversion. Many tasks are things a volunteer could pick off in a spare week or two, and they're a great way to start learning your way around the Subversion code.

If you start one of these tasks, please notify the other developers by marking the issue as "STARTED" in the issue tracker, then mail dev@subversion.tigris.org (subscribe to that list too) with questions. Don't be shy, it's a very civil mailing list.

When you're ready to send in a patch, see the patch posting guidelines. Don't be discouraged if your patch goes through several iterations of review by other developers; this is normal.

Here is the list of all bite-sized tasks.

## Larger (But Not Necessarily Huge) Coding Tasks

The tasks listed below are bigger than bite-sized, but probably don't require new research to solve. In other words, most of them are a Simple Matter Of Programming. You'd need to either be, or be willing to become, familiar with Subversion's internals to solve one of these.

As with the bite-sized tasks, please read the Hacker's Guide to Subversion and don't hesitate to ask questions on the users@subversion.tigris.org and dev@subversion.tigris.org mailing lists (see here for subscription information). Before posting any patches, see the patch posting guidelines.

### Issue #1144: Add Cyrus/SASL authentication support to ra_svn (svn://)

Right now ra_svn only supports the ANONYMOUS and EXTERNAL authentication mechanisms. This is enough to be useful (you can use ssh for developers and daemon mode for anonymous read access), but integrating Cyrus SASL would give users a multitude of other options: passwords at various levels of security, Kerberos, one-time passwords, etc.. The protocol is already designed to support SASL; this would just be implementation work.

### Issue #1844: Subversion clients should be able to authenticate using NTLM/SSPI

We have a subversion/apache server configured to use sspi to authenticate users. Currently the svn client can't authenticate using ntlm/sspi and uses basic authentication to connect to the server. Users have to either store the credentials or enter them each time it is needed. It would be very convenient/secure if the subversion client could use the current user's windows credentials to login to subversion automatically without prompting the user. The neon lib has added sspi support in revision 457 (2005-01-27).

### Issue #1254, etc: Improve error messages

Too many of Subversion's error messages are terse or confusing. Many instances are recorded in issue #1254, but see also issues #2302, #2295, and #2275.

### Issue #525 and Issue #908: Optional or compressed text base storage

Subversion stores locally a pristine copy of the base revision (i.e., the unmodified checked-out revision) of each file in the working copy. These pristine copies are known as "text bases". This is great for doing offline diffs, and for transmitting deltas back to the server when committing. But it's a bit of a space penalty on the client side, and it would be nice to offer users the option to turn it off sometimes, or failing that, to compress the text bases. Doing either or both would be a lot of work, but mostly straightforward coding work.

## Improved Bindings to Other Languages

One of Subversion's strengths is that it offers a rich set of "binding surfaces": well-documented APIs that are available not only in C (Subversion's native language) but in other programming languages as well (see the complete list).

Some of these language bindings are maintained via SWIG, a tool that partially automates the process of generating bindings, while others are maintained by hand. Many of the bindings do not have complete coverage yet, or have interface problems where they do have coverage. So even though they're used in many production systems, there's still plenty of work to do. Specifically:

- The SWIG/Python bindings are in pretty good shape, but their coverage is not yet complete. Help is welcome.

- Our Java, SWIG/Perl, and SWIG/Ruby bindings are in pretty good shape, but maybe there are other languages you'd like to call Subversion APIs from? Lisp/Scheme? Feel free to start a new bindings project, if you don't see what you need here.

## All Open Issues

You want to see the complete list of open bugs, in all its glory? Don't say we didn't warn you...