[haiku-development] Re: RFC: Idea for redefining our participation in Google Summer of Code

Le Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:13:41 +0100, Axel Dörfler <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit: 


A student may choose to publish his patches on haiku-development, if he
wants to.
At the beginning of my project I attached all my patches to tickets on trac (as that is what we ask people to do on haiku-dev, so the patches doesn't get lost), then you asked me to send them on the gsoc list instead.
I agree it's quite a good idea to avoid the student mistakes to be exposed ; but at the same time, when looking at gsoc from the outside one is not seeing all the activity occurring only on this list. As a consequence : - Only mentors can review the student's code and patches. Less reviewers mean less chances of spotting a bug :) - The student does not use the regular way to communicate. It's better to have this list than private mails, but using regular channels whenver possible should be encouraged. - As a direct consequence : if a student get commit access during his project (which is something that should definitely happen), does he have to change his way of working ? Should he send general design questions to haiku-dev so everyone can contribute, and more basic ones about implementation details on the gsoc list ? I'd think he could ask on IRC for simple things.
I think it is not an easy thing to solve. The "GSoC student" status is somewhere between "occasional contributor" and "core developper". We don't want them to have the same privileges as core devs (svn commit, voting voice, ...), but we don't want them to send patches that get forgotten on trac because noone has enough time to look at it.
If I look at last year projects, on the locale kit Oliver had to do a lot of work on creating jamfiles and integrating ICU, and mograting the old sourcecode from the locale kit to our svn. I had tried to do it myself before, but the patches generated were way too big to get manageable and I didn't have commit access to svn, so I couldn't commit them myself. On a similar case, Maxime's work on webkit was done on a git mirror as it couldn't be sent to webkit core directly, and while there is a lot of work being done on the webkit browser, it is still not integrated in Haiku at all. Maybe one solution would be to provide some kind of "playground" branch shared by all the gsoc students, where they could commit things and get them reviewed then merged to trunk, if you really don't want them to touch trunk directly. This way, being a GSoC student is already almost like being a long-term contributor : you get to work with svn, you can use the regular communication channels, and you are more likely to keep working on haiku as a core contributor after the end of the summer. When a studnt worked for 3 month in Haiku and at the end, he still hasn't commit access, I think it's a failure for the project, and the student may learn a lot, but in the end he will probably get frustrated and move on to another project. 

--
Adrien Destugues / PulkoMandy
http://pulkomandy.ath.cx

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