cvs commit: www/en/projects/ideas ideas.xml

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Brooks Davis <brooks at FreeBSD.org> (from Thu, 12 Mar 2009  
09:17:41 -0500):

> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 12:23:59PM +0000, Robert Watson wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 12 Mar 2009, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
>>
>>>> I think there could be a useful project to be done on fleshing out kernel
>>>> SDT providers, but that we need to come up with a more specific
>>>> description if we want it to be useful for GSoC.  We also need to
>>>> identify a potential mentor for the project who can field questions
>>>> during the proposal process, potentially mentor the project, and so on.
>>>
>>> To have it on the ideas list we don't need a GSoC mentor... basically I
>>> say that I think that the DTraceToolkit stuff should stay on the ideas
>>> list in some form (doesn't matter to me if it is marked up fro the GSoC or
>>> not).
>>
>> On the ideas list, perhaps, but I feel increasingly strongly that no idea
>> without a technical contact should be tagged as GSoC-appropriate, and that
>> we should also have mentors in mind for every project there.
>> Pre-submission interaction improves not just the quality of the proposal,
>> but also gives us an early sense as to whether they have the right skills
>> so that they can tune the proposal to what it turns out the students are
>> able to do. I also feel we shouldn't invite people to submit proposals on
>> an idea if we don't have someone willing to mentor them, because we've had
>> that happen and it's unproductive :-).
>
> I agree.  To be blunt and specific, I plan to remove all class="soc"
> specifications on projects that don't have a contact listed before our
> project profile is posted.  That doesn't mean we won't accept gsoc
> proposals on untagged projects or that we can't list them, but the bar
> will be higher.  I'm also not entirely convinced we should list ideas

I see the point for the soc...

> without technical contacts, but that's a separate discussion.

... but I don't see it for the main ideas list. It's not a "I'm  
willing to mentor this project"-list. The purpose is to give ideas. If  
there's no technical contact, it means the person which wants to  
approach the idea has to have "enough" (whatever this means) technical  
expertise or at least needs to be willing to get it. If we would only  
allow stuff with technical contacts, we wouldn't ever get something  
done like the new USB code. Nobody was willing to be a technical  
contact for this for a long time, and then someone stepped forward  
after there was something to work with. Some people may think the USB  
stuff is not a good example, but fact is we have it in the tree now  
and it is better than what we had before. And nobody was doing some  
handholding until it was at a stage where a lot of people where  
patching it into FreeBSD themself.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
Allen's Axiom:
	When all else fails, read the instructions.

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137