Re: Questions on GSoC 2019 Ideas

From: Thomas Gummerer <t.gummerer@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 3, 2019, 16:12 UTC
Message-ID: <20190303161253.GW6085@hank.intra.tgummerer.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8COJg4jGRKFwyi5Fc374To8Z3g3wHx+SD7zQTL5m-TbCg@mail.gmail.com>

On 03/03, Duy Nguyen wrote:

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> On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 10:09 PM Thomas Gummerer <t.gummerer@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm not very familiar with what's required here, but reading the above
> > makes me think it's likely too much for a GSoC project.  I think I'd
> > be happy with a project that declares removing the global variables as
> > the main goal, and adding parallelism as a potential bonus.
> >
> > I'm a bit wary of a too large proposal here, as we've historically
> > overestimated what kind of project is achievable over a summer (I've
> > been there myself, as my GSoC project was also more than I was able to
> > do in a summer :)).  I'd rather have a project whose goal is rather
> > small and can be expanded later, than having something that could
> > potentially take more than 3 months, where the student (or their
> > mentors) have to finish it after GSoC.
> 
> This is why I'm not involved in GSoC. I often mis-estimate the size of
> work (and yes I would still like your tree-based index format in,
> can't remember why it never made it).

So do I, and that's why I'd like to err on the side of having smaller projects :)

I think the main reason the tree-based index format never made it is that the in-core APIs were not set up to make use of the new index format. I'm also still interested in getting it in, but I haven't found the time for looking at making the index code pluggable yet. It would probably take a similar refactoring as with the refs code to get this done.

All that said, GSoC was still a great experience for me, and I got to learn a ton over the summer. But I did feel like I let the people that invested a lot of time in the project as well down a bit, by not being able to finishing the project. And having the feeling of accomplishment of actually finishing a project would definitely have been nice to have as well. So for those reasons I think it would be better for students to take on smaller projects.

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> So yeah if you find removing global variables (which essentially
> identifies shared states, a prerequisite for any parallel work)
> reasonable for GSoC, I'd say go for it.
> 
> Be also aware that this kind of refactoring work could result in lots
> of patches and it takes time to get them merged, if your GSoC goal is
> to get merged.
> -- 
> Duy