Re: [gentoo-dev] Google Summer of Code 2007

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

On Friday 16 February 2007, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> So, is there support among devs for hosting another round of Summer
> students?  Are there good problems for those students to work on, and,
> if so, what are they?  Were people happy with how last year's program
> went, or should we try to do something different?  For what it's worth,
> I think GSOC is worth putting our effort into, but I'd also like to see
> projects that at least have the potential to benefit more of the
> community than just Gentoo.  *Shrug*

Although last summer I wasn't too involved in the process (I was backup mentor 
for a couple of projects, but there was no need for a backup mentor for any 
of them, and I also passed the august offline), I did think with myself of a 
few issues with what SoC did for Gentoo (and the other way around too).

Out of the 14 projects listed in [1], these are the (public) results:

- I don't know of any GUI frontend to baselayout;
- Antarus's work on CVS migration produced some interesting results, but as we 
know, the migration isn't possible just yet;
- blubb's etc-update replacement is sort of complete, I wasn't able to get it 
to work yet, but at least blubb is still around;
- Gentoo/FreeBSD/AMD64 port is deadish, Victor disappeared for what I can 
tell, there weren't many patches that were followed till merge, and there's 
no near hope to get amd64-fbsd working in short time;
- I have no clue what's going on with gentoo-stats;
- Pioto's dynusers (now creandus, I think) is still work in progress, since 
starting, pioto became a dev;
- I have no clue what's going on with the web-based GuideXML frontend;
- JACK support hasn't moved a bit, if possible it became worse because of 
bitrot, as the student dropped off;
- I have no clue what's going on with NetworkManager, but it might actually 
have seen some work on it, considering it's now in portage, but 
metalgod/steev would probably know better;
- I don't know what happened to qaludis, nor I care to be honest as it's an 
external project;
- I don't know what happened to pkgcore, nor I care to be honest as it's an 
external project;
- Alex completed Gentoo/FreeBSD port of Sandbox, although Martin disappeared 
and thus we're forced to unmask sandbox on our profiles for now, and in the 
mean time he also fixed some FreeBSD bugs;
- I have no clue what's going on with SCIRE;
- I have no clue what's going on with the Xorg configuration too.

I admit I cannot of course judge all the progress, as you can see I have no 
clue on about half the projects, but that also means there wasn't a big new 
feature or fix that everybody knows about.
So maybe, the targets we put were too much fuzzy, and difficult to achieve. Of 
course there's also the big unknown of the students, that we can't easily 
judge if we don't know them.

This covers one point, but what most interest me to point out is that we have 
a real low conversion of developers. What I found interesting in the Summer 
of Code initiative was the ability to find new developers for a project, 
people that wouldn't have been involved in open sources projects otherwise.

We enrolled as "students" four Gentoo developers, and only one of the 
remaining ten students was converted into a dev.

Added to the little improvements done by the projects, maybe we could have 
spared a few more slots for the organizations that have achieved more.


[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/user-relations/summerofcode/

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, Sound, ALSA, PAM, KDE, CJK, Ruby ...