[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.

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 19 projects. We 
grew more than 100% from last year, when we had 7 projects, so we're 
really excited about working with all of you this summer!

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


Communicating
=============

The community bonding period has already begun, and the purpose is to 
familiarize you with our general community practices. It is *very 
important* that you are in constant touch with your mentor throughout 
the duration of the program. 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 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 a lot of us are not native English speakers, so don't be ashamed of
writing 'bad english'. 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 are aware of 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
---
The majority of 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 on: http://bugs.gentoo.org/. We
recommend you 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
yes, to what extent.

Blogs
-----
Many developers use blogs to communicate with the community at large. We
recommend 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 already don't have one), and use it to write
anything relevant to your project under a category such as 'gsoc2010' or
'gentoo'. We will aggregate your blogs on our Planet for the entire
Gentoo community to read.


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

Gentoo uses a mix of CVS, SVN and Git internally. We expect you to
maintain a repository containing your code on Gentoo infrastructure,
although you may choose to actively work on the code elsewhere (for
example, Github). 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. Please contact your mentor for help *before*
signing up with a particular service. 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
================

We highly recommend having a centralized location for information about
you and your project, and Trac is an ideal way to do that. 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 Patrick Lauer (patrick@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 weekly progress reports from each of you, at the very least.
Feel free to report more often! Your mentor will tell you his 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.


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:

        Donnie Berkholz: dberkholz@g.o
        Alec Warner (backup admin): antarus@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 you've 
got all the background work done by May 24 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 19 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
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com



Here's the list of this summer's projects. Your primary mentor is first, 
and if you have secondary mentors, they're later in the list:

Improve NetworkManager integration with Gentoo
  Student: Mu Qiao
  Mentors: Robert Piasek, Arun Raghavan, Nirbheek Chauhan

Rewrite of g-pypi ebuild conversion tool
  Student: Domen Kozar
  Mentors: Jesus Rivero, Brian Harring

Ventoo - Visual Configure file editor
  Student: Christopher Harvey
  Mentor: Luis Araujo, Jesus Rivero

Improve the Octave/Matlab support.
  Student: Rafael Goncalves Martins
  Mentors: Denis Dupeyron, Sébastien Fabbro

Project Grumpy
  Student: Priit Laes
  Mentors: Mart Raudsepp, Brian Harring

Port the new distro-neutral initrd framework, Dracut, to Gentoo
  Student: Amadeusz Zolnowski
  Mentors: Lance Albertson, Eric Thibodeau

Porting Portage and its tools to DragonFly BSD.
  Student: Naohiro Aota
  Mentors: Patrick Lauer, Javier Villavicencio

Multiple Repository Support in sys-apps/portage
  Student: Otavio Pontes
  Mentors: Alec Warner, Zachary Medico, Brian Harring

Revive Kuroo
  Student: Detlev Casanova
  Mentor: Brian Dolbec

Help Gentoo Council and Recruiters by providing web based applications
  Student: Joachim Bartosik
  Mentors: Alex Legler, Petteri Raty

Gentoo-x86 QA Website
  Student: John-Patrik Nilsson
  Mentors: Brian Harring, Mart Raudsepp

"IDFetch" (Intelligent Distfile Fetcher)
  Student: Kostyantyn Ovechko
  Mentor: Robin Johnson

Portage/ebuild ability to use file-based capabilities rather than setuid
  Student: Constanze Hausner
  Mentors: Diego Elio Pettenò, Zachary Medico

Bash Programmatic and AST access
  Student: Nathan Eloe
  Mentors: Petteri Raty, Brian Harring

webapp-config rewrite
  Student: Andreas Nuesslein
  Mentor: Benedikt Boehm

Decreasing Gentoo boot time using Upstart
  Student: Oliver Schinagl
  Mentors: Steev Klimaszewski, Robin Johnson

G-CRAN
  Student: Auke Booij
  Mentor: Sébastien Fabbro

The Gentoo Council Web Application
  Student: Wei Xie
  Mentors: Hans de Graaff, Petteri Raty

G-PEAR
  Student: Wiktor W Brodlo
  Mentors: Steve Dibb, Anant Narayanan