[Whonix-devel] A student looking to develop

[adrelanos]

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Hi Keiro!

> I am a student currently working towards a bachelors degree in 
> Computer Science. I am interested in contributing to Whonix's 
> development. I agree with the aims of this project, and I believe
> that allowing anonymity is necessary for truly free speech to
> thrive. In a decade where governments seem to continually erode our
> right to privacy, Tor and Whonix are a breath of fresh air.

Great!

> I have moderate C experience, some Java experience, I know some 
> Python, and I have a quite a bit of Linux experience. Although I
> would like to use this project as an opportunity to improve my
> skills as a programmer and my knowledge of networking, not to
> mention finally having some code in the wild that I can show
> prospective employers.

C and Python might be very useful, we currently have no other active
contributors capable of those languages. Although there is no C code
yet in Whonix's source code (one might be surprised) [binary packages
are fetched from Debian's repository].

Do you know bash and git as well?

> How should I get up to speed with the current developments in
> Whonix?

You mean, keeping up with my changes?

Maybe let's try this four points plan:
1. Get the stable version of Whonix from a user's perspective, read
Whonix's website from a user's perspective. Don't spend too much time
on it.
2. Try to build the development version of Whonix from source code.
There is comprehensive build documentation and you can always ask.
3. Get a rough high level overview how the build process works, either
by reading the code or by reading the source code introduction wiki page.
4. Depending on what your goal is (general scrutiny, reviewing), look
at my git commits. There are not many per day or even per week. Often
it's trivial stuff. If you have different goals, you can also
independently (without following my git commits) concentrate on
specific features, like the one you suggested.

> This will be my first time working on an open-source project. I
> have been looking through the Dev section of the wiki and I am
> interested in bringing easy-to-use VPN capabilities to the Whonix
> Gateway.

I believe in working on features you're personally interested in is a
good way to keep you motivated and I guess many VPN fans would be
happy about that.

Do you propose creating a GUI (and/or wizard) where a user can easily
set up a VPN on Whonix-Gateway? That would be a fine idea.

Alternatively, pimping up the existing tools such as network manager
(NM) would be fine as well. NM looks quite good, what do you think? NM
just missing a few patches here and there.

When a VPN is installed on Whonix-Gateway, the connection would look
like user -> VPN -> Tor; and host traffic would be completely
untorified and wouldn't go through the VPN. (Just saying.)

Developing such a feature would be very independent from what I am
working on. I mean, I don't think I will come up with any changes,
which could mess up your feature in any ways which need more than 10
minutes to fix.

> I hope to be of some help!

:)

Cheers,
adrelanos
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