On Sunday, 9 September 2018 23:00, Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> wrote:
> My limited understanding was that GSoC is mostly about learning and
> exploring, and not necessarily about delivering "perfect" working code,
> though obviously quality code is a desirable outcome.
>
> For whatever it's worth, I very much appreciated how you engaged with
> the LTSP community when trying to resolve technical issues; that is one
> of the most important things in a healthy free software project,
> development doesn't work well in isolation.
Thank you vagrant and scott for appreciating the work. :)
Yes you are right GSoC is not about delivering "extremely perfect" code But about interacting with the community and contributing to open source projects.
I was going results from google about the students that failed at GSoC. I found this mail:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/gsoc-mentors/2016/000048.html
In this, I read that the organization fails the student in very extreme cases. Example student disappears, produces no code at all, etc. This was not in my case. I interacted with the mentors daily, submitted reports on time, wrote blogs every week, made commits every day. One can have a look at my final report:
https://gist.github.com/d78ui98/138c986dffc4d7a094e3ec1c63b545ba
This is why I dont think I deserve to get failed.
Also the mentor dashamir did not follow some guidelines like communicating with the admins before failing as mentioned in the official guideline by GSoC:
https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/help/responsibilities#mentor_responsibilities
I informed him about this. He replied very rudely. He said "GSoC is over, what do you want? Next time you can try to select a better mentor."
I think that you are trying to use out of the context what people said, and this is not good.
You "informed" me about that on Aug 28, and at that time GSoC was really over.
We had already discussed technical issues and problems and your failures before.
You cannot keep bugging me all the time because of your frustrations and grievances.
So the question still is: what do you really want? What do you expect to achieve by this discussion?
I don't think mentors should talk to their students like this. I informed about this to Google as well. They still think that it was organizations decision to fail a student and that's why they are not properly taking a look at the final evaluation result.
I did get a lot of technical and social experience from GSoC. But putting in lot of work and then failing is bothering me. I cannot even say in my resume that I was a GSoC student at Debian. The project has been removed from GSoC completely.
In case that you have forgotten, let me remind you what I wrote to you after the first evaluation:
"Deepanshu, I passed you for the first evaluation because you are a nice guy and I think that you have tried hard to do your best. However you have not been able to finish properly the requirements of the first evaluation, even with so much help from me (and Akash), and even a week later. Honestly I think that your programming and algorithmic thinking skills are not yet mature enough and no matter how much time available you have, you still will not be able to complete them properly. The same goes for the objectives of the second evaluation. Porting Ubuntu packages to Debian maybe is not so difficult, but adding support for RaspberryPi clients can be too difficult for you (judging from what you have done so far).
So, I think that you will not be able to pass the second evaluation. If you have something better to do during the summer, you can stop working on this project and withdraw. You will still get the payment for the first month. I don't want to discourage you, but I don't want you to get disappointing either (working hard for a month and then failing). However if you still want to give it a try, no matter if you fail in the end, you are more than welcome. I would be happy if you prove me wrong and finish all the tasks properly."
I was not sure weather to pass or fail you on the first evaluation, but the advice from
Debian admins was that I should not fail you without giving you a warning, and I found this
reasonable.
You decided to continue and I think that it was a good decision. But now you should not
pretend that you put a lot of work and you are bothered that you failed. Working hard
is a requirement, but is not a guaranty for success. I would have preferred that you
succeeded, but you couldn't. Also, being a nice guy is not enough to succeed (although
I am not sure about that anymore).
I am not sure what should I do here.
Life has failures as well, not only successes. If you listen to my advice,
you should accept the failures with dignity and try to do better next time.
regards
deepanshu