Re: Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC13)

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 20, 2013, 12:07 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD01bUgUz1LST6DPjhQ4qsNEA4-ndpLQ97XqH_fOEdew9w@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAJo=hJvknVedGba5OxjjvZi2=JZyDuDoP2tD+LKQKdZNJ4NcsA@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 7:50 AM, Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 9:42 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 06:23:01PM +0100, Thomas Rast wrote:
>>
>>> * We need an org admin.  AFAIK this was done by Peff and Shawn in
>>>   tandem last year.  Would you do it again?
>>
>> I will do it again, if people feel strongly about Git being a part of
>> it. However, I have gotten a little soured on the GSoC experience. Not
>> because of anything Google has done; it's a good idea, and I think they
>> do a fine of administering the program. But I have noticed that the work
>> that comes out of GSoC the last few years has quite often not been
>> merged, or not made a big impact in the codebase, and nor have the
>> participants necessarily stuck around.
>
> This.

I think it is ok if the code doesn't make a big impact in the code base and it is ok too if the participants don't stuck around. Of course I would love both of these things to happen, but we have to be realistic and just stop expecting it.

Show 10 quoted lines

> I actually think Git should take a year off from GSoC and not
> participate. Consequently I will not be volunteering as backup org
> admin.
>
> Git has been involved since 2007. In all of that time we have had very
> few student projects merge successfully into their upstream project
> (e.g. git.git, JGit or libgit2) before the end of GSoC. Even fewer
> students have stuck around and remained active contributors. When I
> look at the amount of effort we contributors put into GSoC, I think we
> are misusing our limited time and resources.

I don't think so, at least not for me. I feel happy to mentor or co-mentor GSoC student and I don't think I would work much more on git these days if git was not participating to the GSoC.

Show 17 quoted lines

> The intention of the GSoC
> program is to grow new open source developers, and increase our
> community of contributors. Somehow I think Git is falling well short
> of its potential here. This is especially true if you compare Git's
> GSoC program to some other equally long-running GSoC programs.
>
>> And I do not want to blame the students here (some of whom are on the cc
>> list :) ). They are certainly under no obligation to stick around after
>> GSoC ends, and I know they have many demands on their time. But I am
>> also thinking about what Git wants to get out of GSoC (and to my mind,
>> the most important thing is contributors).
>
> I agree, our students have been pretty terrific. I think the
> shortcomings in our GSoC program are on the mentoring side. Our
> program has not really had much success with keeping students active
> and engaged post GSoC. I see that primarily as a mentoring failure.
> And its one we keep repeating each year.

I don't quite agree with this. My experience has been the following:

- 2008: the student I co-mentored did pretty well though he didn't
send to the list his patch series early enough.
So there was some mentoring failure, but anyway the student stuck
around for 9 months and managed to get 53 commits merged.

- 2009: if I remember well, it was decided to have only 2 GSoC student
that year, and that 5 people would co-mentor both of them together.
One of the student did nearly nothing. The other one sent his patch
series too late to the list. My opinion is that he relied too much on
the people mentoring him and he worked on something that was difficult
to merge.

- 2010: the student I co-mentored stopped working 3 weeks before the
mid-term evaluation despite some warnings from me and Peff, and he had
not been doing much a few weeks before that, so we decided to fail him
at the mid term evaluation.

- 2011: I was lucky to mentor Ram who did well and is still around.

So my opinion is that we have some students who are just not doing enough (2 out of 5). Then we have some good students, 2 out of 5 who could sometimes do better if we insisted more on submitting earlier to the mailing list. And we have a few students (1 out of 5) who work difficult to merge projects and who could do better if we insisted more on submitting earlier to the mailing list.

So my conclusions are:
- it's quite often going well or well enough
- when it's not going well often the student is responsible
- yes, we could improve mentoring by providing better projects and
insisting even more on submitting earlier

[...]

Show 8 quoted lines

>>   - There is also the angle that even if _Git_ doesn't benefit directly
>>     from people sticking around, those people may float into other open
>>     source projects and work on them. Which makes the world a better
>>     place on the whole.
>
> Yes, sure, OK. But if Git doesn't participate in GSoC this year
> another org will, and this same benefit will still be had by the
> greater open source community.

The greater open source community benefits a lot these days when Git is improved and get new contributors, as git is now by far the most widely used version control system in the open source community. So my opinion is that we should have has many GSoC student as we can properly handle.

Best regards, Christian.