Git and GSoC 2013

Git and GSoC 2013

[Jeff King]

There was a big thread about a month ago on whether Git should do Google
Summer of Code this year[1].

Some people seemed in favor, and some not. The deadline for git to apply
to GSoC is March 29 (this Friday) at 19:00 UTC. I am willing to act as
the admin again if list consensus is that we should do it. But my point
in sending this email is not to say "yes, we should definitely apply";
it is to give people on both sides one more chance to make their points
and come to a conclusion before the deadline. I.e., I did not want the
decision to be made for us because people were not aware of the
deadline.

In my opinion, a lot of the issues come down to project selection; one
thing that seemed to come up in the thread was that projects are often
not scoped appropriately to get fully merged by the end of the summer. I
think the much smaller projects done by Matthieu Moy's summer students
in past years have been very successful _because_ they are of a size
much closer to patch series done by normal contributors. I realize that
the GSoC time-frame is longer, but I think it's again a matter of
scoping; one large project that tries to merge at the end of the summer
is never going to work. It must be broken down into a series of
reviewable steps, and those steps need to be reviewed and merged
throughout the summer, just like contributions from regular
contributors.

Hand in hand with that, I think we need to treat students more like
regular contributors: discussion on-list, patches reviewed and revised
on-list, etc. And all of that happening throughout the summer. Coding is
only part of being involved in open-source, and traditionally the
students have focused on the code and not on the process of interacting
with the community and shepherding their changes through to "master".

Looking over the proposed project page, I am not that excited about any
of them (including ones I have written for past years) as being both
scoped appropriately and interesting/useful for students and for the
project. I think if people want to do GSoC, we really need to make a
commitment to smaller-scoped projects, and to getting students more
involved in the "regular" process of patch submission. The obvious first
step to that is revising the Ideas list to either have smaller projects,
or to break larger ones into more manageable pieces. Unless that
happens, I don't think it's worth applying.

And if we do apply and get accepted, I think we should look carefully at
the proposals that we select, and be very picky about students and
projects that will fit in the summer scope.

I realize that there is only about 48 hours until the deadline, which is
not much. But I am willing to work on the application materials if
people can agree on a reasonable set of proposed projects[2].

-Peff

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/216485

[2] I have always hoped for students who would submit their own project
    proposals, independent of anything we suggest. After all, that is
    how things happen naturally in open source; contributors scratch
    their own itches. And that is part of why the ideas I post are often
    vague and try to describe a problem rather than a solution. But in
    all our years of GSoC, I recall very few cases of students proposing
    their own projects, and even fewer of them being successful. So I
    have kind of given up hope that we would get any proposal that is
    not spelled out on our ideas page.

Re: Git and GSoC 2013

[Jonathan Nieder]

Jeff King wrote:

> There was a big thread about a month ago on whether Git should do Google
> Summer of Code this year[1].
[...]
> In my opinion, a lot of the issues come down to project selection;

Let me throw in some other issues. :)

 * I think the git project has been very disorganized in vetting
   candidate students.  Other organizations have formal requirements
   (for example, "must submit at least one properly formatted patch to
   qualify") but we seem to rely on a candidate's good sense,
   independence, and general sense of trustworthiness without
   providing guidance beyond that.

   At first glance that wouldn't seem to be a problem --- the accepted
   students have been very good anyway --- but I think that if we
   could communicate more clearly what we need, we might find there
   are more qualified students that we have been missing, and
   promising students might end up working a little in advance of
   GSoC to adapt themselves to the project.

 * Similarly, we are not very good at making clear the expectations
   for students during the program and making sure they are met.  At
   least I know I was lousy about this as a mentor.

   For example, students delay too long before posting patches
   on-list and do not ask for help quickly when they are stuck.  By
   the end of the summer they may start to get a sense of the usual
   contribution workflow when they could have been more effective
   by following it from the start.

   Some organizations require (as a non-negotiable rule) regular blog
   posts from their students, as a way of advertising to others what
   work they are doing and how to help them out.  That could help
   here. 

 * We didn't plan in advance for "What happens when summer ends and
   the students don't have free time any more?"

 * We don't advertise any good recourse available to students if a
   mentor is unexpectedly too busy or hard to contact.  I don't know
   if that's happened in practice.

Matthieu Moy's summer projects worked better in all these respects, I
think.

I don't think we should apply.  Better to take a break and prepare for
next time.

My two cents,
Jonathan

Re: Git and GSoC 2013

[Christian Couder]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jeff King wrote:
>
>> There was a big thread about a month ago on whether Git should do Google
>> Summer of Code this year[1].

I think we should do it.

It looks strange to me to say that students are great and at the same
time that we should not do it.

Let's give them and us one more chance do to well. This is the only
way we can improve.

Best regards,
Christian.

Re: Git and GSoC 2013

[Ramkumar Ramachandra]

Jeff King wrote:
> There was a big thread about a month ago on whether Git should do Google
> Summer of Code this year[1].

Take only one or two students and get the entire community involved in
learning from the GSoC experience, so we can do a bigger one next
year.

Re: Git and GSoC 2013

[Junio C Hamano]

Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Jeff King wrote:
>>
>>> There was a big thread about a month ago on whether Git should do Google
>>> Summer of Code this year[1].
>
> I think we should do it.
>
> It looks strange to me to say that students are great and at the same
> time that we should not do it.
>
> Let's give them and us one more chance do to well. This is the only
> way we can improve.

Do you mean we should be doing the same thing over and over again
and expecting different results?  Einstein may not like it, and I
certainly don't.

What I gathered from the discussion so far is that everybody agrees
that our mentoring has been suboptimal in various ways (not enough
encouragement to engage with the community early, working in the
cave for too long, biting too much to chew etc.).  What makes you
think we would do better this year?

"We have a track record of being not great at mentoring, and we
haven't made an effort to improve it." is a perfectly valid and
humble reason to excuse ourselves from this year's GSoC.

"Students are great" is immaterial.  

In fact, if they are great, I think it is better to give them a
chance to excel by working with organizations that can mentor them
better, instead of squandering their time and GSoC's money for
another failure, until _we_ are ready to take great students.

It is preferrable if the decision were accompanied with a concrete
plan for us to prepare our mentoring capability better (if we want
to participate in future GSoC, that is), but I think it is a
separate issue, and I suspect that it is too late for this year's.

Re: Git and GSoC 2013

[Jeff King]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 09:45:02AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> It is preferrable if the decision were accompanied with a concrete
> plan for us to prepare our mentoring capability better (if we want
> to participate in future GSoC, that is), but I think it is a
> separate issue, and I suspect that it is too late for this year's.

I agree with this. I do think we should participate again, and I think
we should try to address the issues I brought up (and you mentioned
in your email) about project size and community involvement.

My email was meant to be a "maybe it's not too late if people really
want to work on the project ideas page". But I haven't seen anything
happening there, and we really are running right up to the deadline[1].
I think at this point it makes sense to wait a year and try to approach
it sooner next year.

-Peff

[1] I know my email didn't give much time for action; the deadline snuck
    up on me, too.

Re: Git and GSoC 2013

[Christian Couder]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 5:45 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Jeff King wrote:
>>>
>>>> There was a big thread about a month ago on whether Git should do Google
>>>> Summer of Code this year[1].
>>
>> I think we should do it.
>>
>> It looks strange to me to say that students are great and at the same
>> time that we should not do it.
>>
>> Let's give them and us one more chance do to well. This is the only
>> way we can improve.
>
> Do you mean we should be doing the same thing over and over again
> and expecting different results?  Einstein may not like it, and I
> certainly don't.

No, I don't mean we should be doing the same. I agree that smaller
projects are helpful and insisting on submitting right away on the
mailing list is helpful.
But if we don't even try we have no chance to see if it works. We just
lose time.

> What I gathered from the discussion so far is that everybody agrees
> that our mentoring has been suboptimal in various ways (not enough
> encouragement to engage with the community early, working in the
> cave for too long, biting too much to chew etc.).  What makes you
> think we would do better this year?

The fact that we will be more conscious that we need smaller projects
and that we need to push even more for students to send their patch
soon on the mailing list.

If it doesn't work at all we will be set and we will know that there
is not much we can do to make it work.

If we don't even try we will not know soon, so not be able to improve
or decide to stop.

It's like software or science. If you don't test soon your hypothesis
you don't progress fast.

Or do you think we just stand no chance to progress?

By the way we say that students should post soon to the mailing list
to get a feedback soon, but it looks like we don't want to try our
hypothesis around mentoring as soon as we can.
Doesn't it sound strange to you? Aren't we saying "do as I say not as I do"?

> "We have a track record of being not great at mentoring, and we
> haven't made an effort to improve it." is a perfectly valid and
> humble reason to excuse ourselves from this year's GSoC.

It is also a perfectly valid justification to decide to make an effort
to improve our mentoring and to try again.

> "Students are great" is immaterial.

"We are not great at mentoring" is as much immaterial.

> In fact, if they are great, I think it is better to give them a
> chance to excel by working with organizations that can mentor them
> better, instead of squandering their time and GSoC's money for
> another failure, until _we_ are ready to take great students.

How do we know we are ready if we don't try?

By waiting we just lose the experience we already have, because some
mentors might not be around next year, or they will not remember well
about the process.

And some organizations that will perhaps be accepted, if we decide not
to do it, might have no mentoring experience at all. How do you know
they will mentor students better than what we have been doing?

Best regards,
Christian.

Re: Git and GSoC 2013

[Junio C Hamano]

Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 5:45 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>
>> What I gathered from the discussion so far is that everybody agrees
>> that our mentoring has been suboptimal in various ways (not enough
>> encouragement to engage with the community early, working in the
>> cave for too long, biting too much to chew etc.).  What makes you
>> think we would do better this year?
>
> The fact that we will be more conscious that we need smaller projects
> and that we need to push even more for students to send their patch
> soon on the mailing list.
>
> If it doesn't work at all we will be set and we will know that there
> is not much we can do to make it work.

That sounds like doing the same thing over and over again to me.

I just looked at the "ideas" page Thomas sent the link to upthread
this morning, but I didn't see any evidence that it has been been
curated with "we need smaller projects" in mind.

We will be more conscious?  I cannot take that promise at face value
after seeing that the page stayed the same since Thomas resurrected
it from last year's ideas page ever since it was created.

> If we don't even try we will not know soon, so not be able to improve
> or decide to stop.
>
> It's like software or science. If you don't test soon your hypothesis
> you don't progress fast.

The impression I am getting is that the concensus is that we do not
even have hypothesis worth testing with a grant money from GSoC and
students' time at this point, if I may borrow your science analogy.