[gentoo-soc] Welcome, GSoC students!

[Donnie Berkholz]

Welcome to Gentoo’s edition of the Google Summer of Code, and 
congratulations on your selection! We hope you’re already in touch with 
your mentor and getting comfortable with the tools you need, so you can 
write code starting on day 1 of the summer.

The rest of this email contains general information to help you be more 
productive this summer; please read it completely and carefully so you 
don’t miss anything critical.

If you aren’t already in touch with your mentors, this email should be 
followed by another email from your primary mentor giving you more 
specific details. This year, you’ll be working on 1 of 15 projects. 
We’re really excited about working with all of you this summer!

I included a list of all of the people you’ll be working with this
summer, and their projects, at the end of this email.


Communication
=============

The community-bonding period has already begun. Its purpose is to 
familiarize you with our general community practices and allow you to 
complete your project design so you can start coding by May 23.

It is *very important* that you are in constant touch with your mentor 
throughout the duration of the program; poor communication is one of the 
most frequent causes of failure. There are several channels of 
communication that Gentoo developers use, and we’ll go through the most 
important of them:

Mailing Lists
-------------
gentoo-dev is the list where technical discussions related to Gentoo but 
not suited for more specific lists takes place. We highly recommend you 
subscribe to this list and lurk for a while to get a feel of what kind 
of questions are asked on it.

You should already be subscribed to the gentoo-soc mailing list, where 
you will receive important announcements related to the program. In 
addition to these two lists, your mentor might also want you to 
subscribe to another list, depending on your project. A complete listing 
of all our mailing lists, along with information on how you can 
subscribe to them is available on: 
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml

The primary language of communication on most of our lists is English,
but many of us are not native English speakers, so don’t be ashamed of
writing “bad English” although SMS text language is typically frowned
upon (“u” instead of “you” for example). It is usually sufficient if you
are able to communicate your idea and everyone understands what you are
trying to say. Also, don’t be afraid of asking “stupid questions” — many
of you are new to the world of open-source software, and we know that.
We’re here to help.

When starting a new thread on a mailing list, send a new email to the
list — don’t reply to an existing thread. Also, you are expected to
send plain-text email, no HTML! Learn how to quote relevant portions
when replying to a thread. This web page might help:
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

IRC
---
Most Gentoo developers hang out in several channels on the Freenode IRC 
channel. IRC is generally used for real-time conversations and is very 
useful when you want a quick reply. The starting point for you should be 
the #gentoo-soc channel; your mentor will tell you which other channels 
you are recommended to join. If you are new to IRC, this might help: 
http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/irctutorial.html

IRC is a highly informal environment, and we don’t recommend you make
important decisions there unless you’ve scheduled a meeting with your
mentor to discuss them. Even if you do, we recommend you archive that
decision by other means (a post to a list, blog post) since most IRC
channels are not logged. Also, some developers don’t use IRC at all but
they may have something valuable to say.

Bugzilla
--------
Gentoo maintains a bug database at http://bugs.gentoo.org/ and you should 
sign up for an account there. Depending on your project, your mentor may 
expect you to file bugs and follow them. Whenever your project involves 
changes to code maintained by existing Gentoo developers, you will 
usually have to file a bug and follow it up. Your mentor will tell you 
whether or not you will be using Bugzilla, and if so, to what extent.

Blogs
-----
Many developers use blogs to communicate with the community at large. We 
highly recommend, but do not require, that you read posts on Planet 
Gentoo (http://planet.gentoo.org/) and add the feed to your reader. We 
also highly recommend that you get a blog for yourself (if you don’t 
already have one), and use it to write anything relevant to your project 
under a category such as “gsoc2011” or “gentoo.” We will aggregate your 
blogs on our Planet for the entire Gentoo community to read.


Code Management
===============

Gentoo uses a mix of Git, SVN, and CVS internally. We expect you to 
maintain a repository containing your code on Gentoo infrastructure. One 
of the explicit aims of the community-bonding period is to get you up to 
speed with the version-control system you will be working with. In some 
cases, you may be expected to work on an existing repository — contact 
your mentor for specifics.

To have a repository set up, contact Robin Johnson (robbat2@g.o)
and send him a public SSH key, the repository type, and the repository
name. Your mentor can help you with this.


Project Websites
================

You must have a centralized, permanent location for information about 
you and your project that is hosted by Gentoo. If you're working on an 
established codebase like Portage or Porthole, you can just use its 
existing infrastructure. Otherwise, Trac is an ideal way to fulfill this 
requirement.

We are happy to set up Trac instances for your project, so it has an 
online home where people can go to learn more about it. This will 
provide you with a homepage, a wiki, a timeline, and possibly 
integration with your source code.

To have Trac set up, contact Robin Johnson (robbat2@g.o) with 
details about your project. The Trac instance should have the same name 
as your repository, if possible. Discuss with your mentor whether Trac 
is something you need.


Shell Access
============

As a GSoC student with Gentoo, you get access to one of our shell
servers. This is an ideal place to run an IRC client like irssi coupled
with screen, so that you are always available on IRC and can reconnect
from anywhere. Contact Robin Johnson (robbat2@g.o) with your
public SSH key, and he will set you up with access.

If you don’t already have an SSH key, you can generate one like this:
`ssh-keygen -t dsa`. Be sure to set a passphrase on your key. The
“id_dsa.pub” file is what you send to Robin.


Progress Reports
================

We expect progress reports from each of you at least once a week. Feel 
free to report more often! At the top, provide a brief summary of your 
project to remind anyone who hasn’t followed it closely and tell us 
whether it's on schedule, ahead of schedule, or behind schedule. Then 
tell us about your accomplishments, your problems, how you solved them, 
and your plans for the next week.

Your mentors will tell you their preferred method of communication, but 
you must also post your weekly progress reports to the gentoo-soc 
mailing list, as well as on your blog for all to see. Make sure that you 
inform your mentor well in advance if you plan to be missing for a week 
or more (vacation, exams etc.). We understand that you have a student 
life to attend to in parallel, but if you are missing for more than a 
week without reason, we will be forced to disqualify you from the 
program.

Gentoo's GSoC admins will also require very short surveys on a regular 
basis to help us ensure you have a great time this summer.


Questions
=========

Your mentor is the primary contact for any questions pertaining to the
program, technical or not. However, it is possible that a mentor may be
unreachable for sometime due to personal reasons or otherwise. It is
*extremely* important that you immediately notify our organization
administrators in the event that your mentor is unavailable for more
than 3 days. The administrator will immediately look into the issue and
assign a new mentor, if required. Since all of us are from various
cultures around the world, it is also possible that you and your mentor
may not “get along” very well. Please do contact our organization
administrators to discuss any such issues:

    Primary admin
        Donnie Berkholz: dberkholz@g.o

    Backup admins
        Alec Warner: antarus@g.o
        Leslie Hawthorn: lh@g.o
        Grant Goodyear: g2boojum@g.o

As a final note, we want to remind you that this is the Summer of Code, 
and not the Summer of Project Research And Design or the Summer of 
Learning Your Programming Language And Tools. Please make sure to 
complete all the background work by May 23, so you can spend the whole 
summer writing code.

We’re looking forward to a great summer with all of you, and we hope
that all 15 projects are successful. Please don’t hesitate to use any of
the mentioned communication channels if you have a question or doubt.

Have a great summer!

--
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Admin, Summer of Code
Gentoo Linux and X.Org
Blog: http://dberkholz.com



Projects
========
(Primary mentor listed first, backup mentors and co-mentors later)


libbash runtime
    Student: Mu Qiao
    Mentors: Petteri Räty
Client-server model for reporting and querying package statistics
    Student: Vikraman Choudhury
    Mentors: Alec Warner, Chris Harvey
Gentoo/Java IDE Integration
    Student: Kyle Pan
    Mentors: Serkan Kaba
Django CMS replacement for the www.gentoo.org website
    Student: Theo Chatzimichos
    Mentors: Matthew Summers, Robin Johnson
Apache Maven Integration for Gentoo EBuilds
    Student: Kasun Gajasinghe
    Mentors: Mathieu Le Marec - Pasquet, Serkan Kaba
Distfile patching support
    Student: Rafael Goncalves Martins
    Mentors: Robin Johnson, Denis Dupeyron
PMS compliance test suite
    Student: Michał Górny
    Mentors: Denis Dupeyron, Sébastien Fabbro
Gentoaster - freshly cooked Gentoo VM images, on demand
    Student: Liam McLoughlin
    Mentors: Ole Markus, Tim Harder
Rework Porthole to use the portage API
    Student: Detlev Casanova
    Mentors: Brian Dolbec
Automated benchmark suite for numerical libraries in Gentoo
    Student: Andrea Arteaga
    Mentors: Sébastien Fabbro
Glentoo
    Student: Robert Seaton
    Mentors: Anant Narayanan, Luca Barbato
Auto dependency builder
    Student: Alexander Bersenev
    Mentors: Marien Zwart
Provide Gentoo 11 LiveDVDs with Anaconda installer
    Student: Wiktor Brodlo
    Mentors: Denis Dupeyron, Luca Barbato
Help Gentoo Council by providing web based applications
    Student: Joachim Bartosik
    Mentors: Petteri Räty, Luca Barbato
Ebuild generator
    Student: Sebastian Parborg
    Mentors: Constanze Hausner, Donnie Berkholz