Hello, Lucene.NET dev mailing list and GSoC applicants! (I have BCC'ed the applicants here in case they are not subscribed to the mailing list yet, so as to not expose their personal email addresses.)
For this year's Google Summer of Code, I volunteered to be a mentor on behalf of Lucene.NET. I worked with PMC Chair Shad Storhaug to come up with a possible project: improving our Replication and ASP.NET Core support. This is work that can be done separately from the 4.8 release so as to not potentially impact any timelines there. The goal of this project is to make it easier for users to set up index replication from an ASP.NET Core site, Linux/Windows service, command-line app, or otherwise, by leveraging Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection for familiar and convenient configuration. Students are welcome to submit other project ideas, but typically they base their proposals on the ideas we provide. I'm excited (and a little anxious) to share that we had *seven* official submissions for our project in the GSoC portal (plus one via email separately), from countries all over the globe! This far exceeded my expectations, and I think this is a sign of the desire for more .NET project representation in GSoC. Next year, I hope we can have more mentors available to do multiple projects in parallel based on this demand. (Wink, wink, committers!) I am working through the Apache Community (ComDev) process for grading and ranking the proposals now. The announcement of any selections, if our project makes the cut, will happen first via them and/or Google, so do not expect an announcement from me. It is possible that Apache is not awarded enough project slots for GSoC for *any* mentee for our project to make the cut. As noted at the link below, "[t]he goal is *not* to identify the “best” projects for the ASF, but the best mentees who have applied to the ASF." So whether we get selected at all is out of my hands, but I really hope it happens and that I can work with a mentee on delivering this project this summer. You can read more about this process here: https://community.apache.org/gsoc/mentee-ranking-process.html I would also like to personally apologize to the applicants for not being more involved with providing feedback on your proposals before the submission deadline. This is my first time doing anything like this, and I'm doing this mostly on my own, and learning as I go. I did not realize exactly how this process would go, and I should have been better prepared, and reached out to ComDev for better understanding of my obligations prior to the submission deadline. I did not realize until then that I was supposed to have done some steps before it got to submission; I thought that all happened afterwards. To those of you that emailed us, my sincerest apologies for not providing guidance and feedback on preparing and refining your proposal. I promise to do a better job in the future. Not like most of you needed the feedback anyways; the proposals were overall very good! I'm very proud of your efforts to create these proposals for a project that will greatly benefit our community. I'm also excited to explore some of the fresh and unexpected ideas that were proposed. I want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone that took the time to submit a proposal for this year's Google Summer of Code! I wish we could accept more than one of you, but that will have to wait for next year when hopefully we can have multiple project ideas and mentors. Regardless of if you are accepted or not, I hope you'll stay close to our community, and help our project out by contributing a PR, or even just using the library and letting us know of any problems you encounter. Working on this project has been one of the most fun, educational, and intellectually challenging experiences of my career, and I hope your involvement will be the same. That's all for now, I'll provide my next update after the ASF GSoC selections have been announced. Paul Irwin Apache Lucene.NET PMC
