Re: [PATCH] Add ideas for GSoC 2024

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 6, 2024, 08:26 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD2t-eD_WWz8Zv_iz-uPL6bqxO8o8_SXgvRc-p2v=FCY-Q@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <ZcHH9UCiQgGvugyc@tanuki>

On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 6:47 AM Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 05, 2024 at 05:43:17PM +0100, Christian Couder wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> > "Difficulty: Low" might not be very accurate from the point of view of
> > contributors. I think it's always quite difficult to contribute
> > something significant to Git, and sometimes more than we expected.
>
> That's certainly true. I understood the difficulty levels here as being
> relative to the already-high bar that the Git project typically sets.

I am not sure potential contributors are aware of the high bar that the Git project typically sets.

> Otherwise there wouldn't be much use to specify difficulty in the first
> place if all items had the same difficulty.
>
> Or is the intent of the difficulty level rather on a global GSoC level?

Yeah, I think it makes more sense to consider it like this.

> In that case I agree that we should bump the difficulty to "medium".

Yeah, I think we should bump it to "medium".

Show 13 quoted lines

> > From reading the discussion it looks like everyone is Ok with doing
> > this. I really hope that we are not missing something that might make
> > us decide early not to do this though.
>
> I agree that this is a risky one, and that's what I tried to bring
> across with the "harder part will be to hash out how to handle backwards
> compatibility". Overall I think this project will be more about selling
> the patch and reasoning about how it can be done without breaking
> backwards compatibility.
>
> We could bump the difficulty to high to reflect that better. But if you
> deem the risk to be too high then I'm also happy to drop the topic
> completely.

I think we can keep this topic with a "Medium" difficulty. Perhaps it will actually not be very difficult if all goes well.

Yeah, it may seem strange, but I think unless we start to have projects not related much to our code base, like perhaps projects related to our web sites or some infrastructure or the Git Rev News or our docs, I think most projects should have a "Medium" difficulty. We might want to use "High" sometimes if we want to discourage contributors unless they have some special background related to the specific topic (like multi-threading for example if we had related projects).