GSoC mentors for Git.pm

Hello,

I was considering applying for GSoC this year, but for personal reasons I decided not to propose anything this year, and focus on some other personal projects. Anyway, I was thinking about something that might still help the Git organization this year, so I'd like to share the idea with you, to see if it's not too crazy, and if it would be doable.

In a previous mail, Jakub said one of the limitations for the number of accepted students is the number of available mentors. Well, for the project I'm interested in, modernizing Git.pm, he is the suggested mentor himself, and also for the gitweb one (adding a JS framework). But if he is the only available mentor for both projects, and there are many students interested in both of them, only one will be accepted, as he'll probably be unable to mentor two students. Is that correct? So that either "Javascript library in gitweb" is accepted, or "modernizing Git.pm". (Of course, it seems one person can mentor two projects, but that's not advised by Google, and Git would profit if there were at least co-mentors for one of the projects.)

I was thinking... if the problem is the lack of mentors, would it be possible, for instance, for the Git.pm proposal, to ask people from the Perl community, like the ones who wrote Git modules on CPAN (Git::Wrapper, Git::PurePerl, etc) to help out? Maybe they would have different insights on what can be done in Git.pm, how it could be done in a better way, etc. On the other hand, they would not make anything the git community wouldn't approve, because the community would be involved in every step. Do you think this is viable? Maybe there could even be more than one mentor per student (last year I had two mentors for GSoC), so that we could have one mentor who has a stronger knowledge in the Perl language, and another who has a stronger knowledge in Git's internals, etc.

If this would be helpful, I'd be willing to contact people to see whether they'd like to candidate for being a Git mentor. Also, I'm suggesting the Perl community because I know some of them, and it makes sense (at least in my head) for the project I was interested in. But maybe this could be expanded to other proposals? If this was possible, it could ease the burden for the current mentors, and get more projects accepted for git.

Or maybe there are more people in this mailing list who would volunteer for the job? I contacted Ævar Bjarmason to see if he is interested, but maybe someone here would like too.

Regards, André

I'd be interested in doing what I can to help, but I'm not in a position to put myself up as a full mentor. The good news is that I've got several years of Perl and JS experience under my belt, and am quite used to finding where people are stuck and nudging them along. The bad news is that I know next to nothing about git internals or about XS (which I'd expect to feature heavily in a new Git.pm). I'm also settling in to a new job, so can't give strong guarantees about availability - for example, I'm pretty sure IRC access from work isn't going to happen, and have no idea what the olympics will do to my commute in the summer.

If Jakub needs some kind of teaching assistant to help with code review and firming questions up then I'd be happy to help. But if it needs to be someone who can infuse a strong vision for the end result then you're better off looking elsewhere.

	- Andrew

On 04/01/2012 07:21 PM, Andrew Sayers wrote:

Well, this sounds great, at least to me. Jakub will probably know better 
how and if you're fit as a mentor. From what I can tell, specially if 
there is more than one mentor for a project, you wouldn't have to spend 
more than 5 hours a week on it. Probably even less. And I think the Perl 
+ JS experience is good enough for it. Maybe you'd be more fit for the 
JavaScript framework in gitweb project?