Welcome, students!
The cairo graphics project is participating in Google Summer of Code 2008. This is a fantastic opportunity for students to gain experience with the free-software community, work closely with experts, and also make a valuable contribution to a significant project. More than that, working with the cairo graphics library and community is a lot of fun! (And Google even pays the student a little bit.)
Interested students should review Google's overview of the program and also the cairo project's ideas. Each idea in this list contains a short description of what the project would consist of, and also a difficulty rating (Easy, Medium, or Hard), so that students can better estimate their ability to complete the project.
Any student that sees an interesting project idea there should then subscribe to the cairo@cairographics.org mailing list and send an email off stating the project of interest. There on the list, the student can start to interact with potential mentors and learn more details about what the project will require.
Finally, between March 24 and March 31, (see Google's timeline for the exact cutoff dates/times) students will submit applications to the Summer of Code program. And then the real fun starts as mentors and students work together over the (northern hemisphere) summer to make cairo more excellent than ever.
We're pleased that you're interested in the cairo graphics library. And we hope that you enjoy playing with and improving this code. Have fun with cairo!