2014-02-08 20:45 GMT+04:00 Niall Douglas <s_sourceforge@nedprod.com>:
On 8 Feb 2014 at 9:41, Antony Polukhin wrote:
> * Library for basic integration with spreadsheet applications
> Excel/LibreOfficeCalc/OpenOfficeCalc and OfficePrograms (Modifying cell,
> getting results from cells, saving documents, saving in PDF)

I'm struggling to see why Boost here?

Boost is everywhere. We already have libraries that wrap around MPI, manipulate images using 3rd party libraries, unify multiprecision libraries. We have GSOC ideas for physics, databases and audio, so why not office?
 
As I remember something like this library was proposed by Herb Sutter on one of the conferences (can't find the link thou).

I see this project as a library that unifies API across different office libraries and allow users to use Excel/Calc/Word/Writer functionality in their own projects (for generating reports, extracting data from odt/doc formats). This library can be useful for banking software, CRMs and many other programs.

> * Program protection and obfuscation tools (marking part of assembly at
> compilation, encrypting/decrypting part of the binary on-the-fly, detecting
> debuggers, detecting emulators and virtual machines, computer
> identification and gathering hardware specific identifiers...)

Similarly why Boost?

Library that provides instruments for a binary to self control. This can be useful for protection against viruses and other attacks; protect programs against reverse engineering; can help post-process binaries (find how a compiled function looks like, put something into the binary after compilation, compute and store checksums of binary). I hope this will open the path for experimenting with binaries (self decompressing binary? self modifying binary?)

Boost is a field for experiments, so why not?
 
> If there is an interest in those projects, I'll add some description to the
> GSOC wiki page.

Definitely +1 to the Travis CI work and improving Android/RasPI
compatibility and testing. Feel free to add away to the GSoC page.

OK, I'll add it in a few days.
 
Aside no 1: I may be able to help out with reviewing any Travis CI
mentoring as AFIO uses Travis CI extensively.

Thanks a lot! It'll be great to have your help.
 
Aside no 2: If we do use Travis CI a lot, we ought to ask the Boost
SC to make a regular donation to Travis CI as part payment for the
service. I send them EUR5/year for what AFIO uses, they actually wrote
me a nice hand written letter to thank me crazily enough.

Let's start from finding a student for this task :)
 

--
Best regards,
Antony Polukhin