I agree that we should do it. Looking a the list for 2006, I think we should steer clear of projects that might require significant knowledge of Gentoo Linux internals or that may have a lot of difficult interdependencies and/or coordination. For example, moving to a different revision control system does not, at least on the surface, seem like a project that a single SoC student could pull off, considering the significant amount of coordination required.
I think I good way to start 2007 would be to put together an informal guide for how to choose appropriate SoC projects. These guidelines should be geared towards helping to ensure a greater likelihood of rapid progress and successful completion. My list: 1) Should be a specific, focused problem or challenge 2) Should not have a large number of technical inter-dependencies 3) Should not require significant cross-team coordination/project management work 4) Anything that touches core gentoo functionality should be done as a proof of concept, not as an official replacement (changing official core stuff has distro-wide implications which is not suitable for SoC efforts and makes the design stage overly complex - "officialness" can be considered afterwards if the SoC effort is successful) 5) An emphasis on training and mentoring future Gentoo developers to bring lasting benefits to the project. This means: interesting, fun projects, good experiences are more important than solving incredibly thorny problems. 6) The challenges need not be hard - this is not our money so we need not set artificially high expectations. We should not expect a student with relatively little Gentoo experience to solve challenges that we have struggled to find solutions for. 7) Projects should be achievable by a single person working part-time over 3 months (this *is* summer, after all) and have clearly defined goals for completion. -Daniel On 2/20/07, Christel Dahlskjaer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hiya all, Let's do a quick re-cap of Summer of Code '06: Gentoo had 14 project slots, out of these fourteen two were on Gentoo external Gentoo project which I will leave out of the re-cap. That leaves us with twelve projects, four of which were being worked on by at the time current Gentoo developers. Leaving us eight "newcomers," out of these eight four has been recruited and I belicve an additional one is in the recruitment queue. Some of the projects have been picked up and are being worked on daily, some we've had problems getting acceptance for from the projects where they would be most suited (Beacon - GDP), and some may have fizzled off and died when SoC ended (be that because the student were no longer involved and didn't feel that they were welcomed into the community post-soc, or be that because it just didn't end up being a small idea turned explosion). Summer of Code 2006 was thrown together practically overnight, we jumped onboard after the deadline, by pure luck, and due to lack of planning ended up with whatever projects people could think up in no time and what mentors felt comfortable mentoring at said time. Based on the timeframe and having to jump into the deep end I'd say SoC was a tremendous success for us, not least as a recruitment tool. And of course, it feels great to put something back into the community. Summer of Code '07 is about to kick off, those of us who participated in one form or another last year are pretty geared up to do it again. This time around we've got a chance to plan better, apply in time.. Should we SoC? Of course we should! Can we think up projects? Do we have willing mentors? Will Google have us once more? (with feeling) Summer of Code itself should be a lot more organised this year, OSPO has put a fair chunk of work into getting things up to speed and has listened to the feedback of both students and mentoring organisations from last year. -- Christel -- [email protected] mailing list
-- [email protected] mailing list
