Re: Git in GSoC 2014

[Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>]

On 02/25/2014 04:41 PM, Jeff King wrote:
> I'm pleased to announce that Git has been accepted to this year's Google
> Summer of Code.

Cool!  Thanks to Peff and Thomas and Vicent and whomever else was
involved in getting our application done!  For those who don't know, the
application covers both Git core and libgit2.

> We didn't discuss earlier whether we would have any specific
> requirements for students during the proposal period (e.g., having a
> patch accepted). It would be good to put together rules (or barring any
> specific requirements, guidelines to help students put together a good
> proposal) as soon as possible. Suggestions are welcome.

Requiring students to submit a reasonable patch and follow up on review
comments seems like it would be a good way to filter out non-serious
students.  (I hesitate to require that the patch be accepted because it
can take quite a while for a patch to make it to master, despite of the
student's efforts.)

Does anybody know whether other organizations have had good experience
with criteria like that?  Does it chase *all* the applicants away?

If we wanted to impose such a hurdle, then we would definitely have to
make up a list of microprojects so that the students don't have to start
from nothing.  I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to find tiny projects
estimated at 10-30 minutes of actual work, which should be plenty
difficult for a student who also has to figure out how to check out the
code, conform to our coding standards, run the unit tests, create a
patch submission, etc.

If the reaction is positive to this idea then I volunteer to spend
several hours tomorrow looking for microprojects, and I suggest other
core developers do so as well.  They should presumably be submitted as
patches to the ideas repository [1].

What do you think?

Michael

[1] https://github.com/git/git.github.io

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/