Google summer of Code?

[Jameson Quinn]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 7:24 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz <
bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

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> Jameson Quinn wrote:
> > Honestly, this is news to me. (and I am the co-administrator of the
> > Sugarlabs program). If I had to articulate my view of our priorities, it
> > would be something like the following:
> >
> > 7-10 points: Key sugar core improvements. Long-standing, important gaps
> like
> > versioning or unit-tests at the high end of this.
>
> As others have pointed out many times, the SoC projects that are least
> likely to produce useful results are the ones that are the most ambitious.
>  In particular, it is difficult to find SoC applicants who are ready to
> make deep modifications to an existing codebase, or will be able to
> architect complex software.  Remember, SoC applicants are mostly current
> undergrads, so most have never participated in multi-person development
> effort, or written anything larger than 1000 lines.


Agreed. However, I think that a relatively-skilled GSoC student could take
on one of the tasks I mentioned. Versioning could build on CScott's OLPCFS2,
which AFAIK works remarkably well; it really only needs an interface and
maybe a converter. Unit tests require a harness (and Sugarbot already
exists) and a couple of demo self-tests of the harness; the tests themselves
would be a separate story. Yet it is true, both of these would still be
ambitious, and would probably be scored down because of it.


>
>
> > 0-8 points: Proposal quality.
>
> Maybe this problem is wrapped up in "Proposal quality".  If I were
> designing a system to reflect my own internal judgment structure, I would
> probably add another /multiplying/ factor, the estimated probability of
> success (although I hope we can do selection without resorting to
> numerical scores.)


I agree. The numbers are only a way of communicating, not a proposed system
for choosing.
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