Re: Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC13)

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 19, 2013, 07:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7v7gm492ty.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CALkWK0=s4XX0mmUTAcNBHyqdrryhMYvhtrNZCFFccJJBUUVdUg@mail.gmail.com>

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Junio C Hamano wrote:
> ...
>> I think the real issue is everybody in the GSoC mentor candidate
>> pool grossly underestimates the scope of suggested projects, does
>> not encourage students to send early drafts to the public from the
>> beginning, and perhaps overestimates the ability of total beginners.
>> After seeing my "index-thing is too big in scope" warning repeatedly
>> ignored for the last year's GSoC, I am not very hopeful unless the
>> attitude towards GSoC and its students drastically changes on our
>> mentors' end.
>
> The short undiplomatic version of that is that our mentors suck (I'm
> not pointing fingers, but that's what I infer from failing projects).

I was conflating between people who add "suggested project" and who act as mentors. I do not think mentors are primarily responsible for bad suggested projects.

Our mentors may be wonderful but I do not have enough evidence to judge either way. They are mostly student-facing and I as a bystander to GSoC process didn't see much of their involvement in their students' work---maybe that is how it is supposed to work, maybe not. The only failing of them observable from my point of view was that we repeatedly saw the initial round of patches come very late.

But my complaints were primarily about those sure-to-fail project suggestions.

Show 5 quoted lines

> I propose that we have one thread for every proposal where we can all
> discuss the implementation outline- this will serve as authoritative
> source of information for students, and for picking mentors (the
> people who contribute most to the discussion).  Students should be
> matched with mentors on an individual basis.

You are being unreasonable and/or unrealistic. A topic that needs a large discussion thread to pre-discuss design and outline by many existing members of community and mentor candidates is a sure sign that the topic is too big for a beginner. A topic that needs only a small enough discussion thread on the other hand will come to a polished conclusion before even the student shows up.

This is exactly why I suggested "doable as a private, at most two-weekend hack by an experienced" as a quick and dirty way to measure the size of a project.