Re: Google Summer of Code 2008
On 27/02/08 at 22:00 +0100, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
> On 27/02/2008, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > Many of the students that were selected were already well-known
> > Debian contributors or developers. The first problem with that is
> > that some of those students used their GSOC time to work on their
> > usual Debian tasks instead of their GSOC project, leading to
> > disapointing results, unsuccessful projects, less projects being
> > accepted the next year, etc.
>
> Nice claims. Pointers?
I agree that this is mainly based on personal perception (but that's not
really my fault: no final report about what students did (in detail) are
available).
> > (1) Forbid DDs and people in the NM process waiting for FD/DAM to
> > apply as students.
>
> How is this distinction relevant? Isn't that possible to be
> waiting-for-that-never-coming-DAM-review, student, but also working on
> various opensource projects, as well as maintaining packages, alone or
> within teams, working on various areas of the Debian project (e.g. QA,
> by providing with patches, NMUing packages; or mentoring people with
> their new or updated packages), at the very same time?
>
> I believe it's possible. And I believe you'll find a trivial example.
GSOC != "get funding for existing DDs to do $DEBIAN_WORK". If GSOC is
only DuncTank 2.0, I think that we could have a nice thread^Hflamewar
about whether it's good or evil. GSOC is considered good by many people
because one of its stated goals is to bring fresh blood to free
software.
Now, I agree that "fresh blood" is difficult to define. Is someone that
has been involved a bit in Debian for 1-2 months "fresh blood"? Someone
who submitted some bug reports, but never got involved? someone who is
very involved in GNOME, but not involved in Debian? So my distinction
sucks, but I couldn't come up with something better that fitted in a
line.
> Now. How come it wouldn't be possible to apply for a GSOC slot,
> lowering the involvement in one (or more) of the above-mentioned
> areas, and concentrating on a specific project?
Past years show that this is very hard to do, but of course it's
possible. But that also means that we are shooting ourselves in the
foot: we are asking someone to lower his involvement in some areas of
Debian, where we might be depending on him. Many Debian teams might not
be able to afford to lose an active contributor during the summer (just
before the lenny release!) so he can work on his GSOC project.
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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