Dear Davide, On Sun, 7 Apr 2019 at 12:55, Davide Gerhard wrote: > On Sunday, 07/04/2019 11:55 CEST, Mojca Miklavec wrote: > > On Sun, 7 Apr 2019 at 09:40, Davide Gerhard wrote: > >> > >> Sorry, I am late but I saw only the other day that MacPorts > >> participate to the Google Summer of Code. > > > > Maybe we should be doing a better job in marketing :( > > Any advice on how the message could have reached you (provided that > > you have contributed before) would be greatly appreciated. > > it was you on github issue about mercurial.
Yes, I'm aware of that, but even in that case it was only you who has been notified (a bit late), there could still be other contributors who are / were not aware about GSOC. (Those subscribed to the mailing list couldn't have missed the news, and we received request to move the discussions elsewhere. We might need to set up something like Slack in fact, but we have never in history received so many proposals from students, so we were kind of caught by surprise this year.) My question is: what would we need to have done in order for the news to have reached you one month (or more) ago? We have absolutely no idea which contributors are qualifying students, so that we could notify them individually. We had a notification on the first page of the website (which is admittedly too boring to ever visit) and it was impossible to miss it for anyone subscribed to the development mailing list, but there are certainly other ways to reach the target population. > > Previous contribution to the project definitely brings you "extra > > points", but the time left is super scarce, so you need to use it > > well. > > > >> Any comment will be appreciate. > > > > I'm not familiar with the topic, so I cannot really advise you, but: > > > > (1) Please get subscribed to the development mailing list. > > > > (2) Please carefully read the archives at > > https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-dev/ > > in particular those from March and April this year. > > > > (2.a) There is quite a bit of extra information about trace mode on > > the list already. > > read [1] and related thread and probably I am too late to contribute through > GSoC. So I give up. It's entirely up to you whether you read and treat the response as a discouragement or as a challenge. One definite way to not get selected is by not even trying. As I said, being a previous contributor is certainly an advantage you have over those who have never even used MacPorts before, but not enough on its own. You still need to know what exactly you are proposing to implement and prove in some way that you can do it. The proposal needs to contain sufficient details that it's clear to the mentors that you know what you are talking about. What you sent now doesn't contain anywhere near sufficient details. If you only start studying the topic after you send the final proposal, it could happen that you realise that what you propose is not even feasible to do in the given timeframe ;) Mojca
