Congratulations to all the selected GSOC students and projects

[Clemens Lang]

Hi Umesh and Zero, and welcome to MacPorts!

You have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2017 and will work for
MacPorts over the summer. Congratulations, we are happy to have you!

First of all let me welcome you to our organization. I am looking
forward to a good summer with an interesting project to be implemented
which will push the MacPorts project further.

Please read our guidelines we put together here:
  http://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeGuidelines

Please keep them in mind during the program as they are meant to avoid
any problems with your project, your progress or anything else. If you
have additions to it, further questions or comments, just talk to us.

We are now in the so called community bonding period. This means, we can
get to know each other better and refine some parts of your proposals
until the actual coding starts.

Google has changed the program timeline this year to include three
evaluations instead of the two they previously had. This makes the most
important dates for the summer:

 June 26: First evaluation
 The roadmap should be final and it would be good to have some initial
 progress visible by then.

 July 24: Second evaluation
 You should have a good overview of what is left to do until project
 completion by this date. Most of the work should be finished.

 August 21: Pencils down
 This is the date for students to submit code to Google. The third
 evaluation will start shortly after that.

Coding is supposed to start on May 30, prepare your task in a way which
allows you to start right away at this date. Of course you can also
start earlier once you discussed everything with your mentor, we don't
want to hold you back. :-)

As Google Summer of Code student you will get commit access to our Git
repositories. To create your account, you need to choose a handle (which
will become your @macports.org address) and tell us a mail address we
should forward incoming mails to as well as your GitHub account. Since
Zero King already has commit access with MacPorts, this only applies to
Umesh. Please contact macports-infra at lists.macports.org with this
information.

How experienced are you with using version control and Git in
particular? If need be, we can arrange a short introduction on IRC or at
least give you some hints. We also used to have a short introduction
round on MacPorts base in the last years. Since Zero King isn't working
on base, this probably makes sense for Umesh, if you want it?

I did a similar talk at MacPorts Meeting 2016 in Slovenia – you can
watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46qshiDskrM.

As a general rule, we as mentors are here to assist you with your
project, so please just ask if you need assistance with anything. I may
not always find time to answer quickly, but please keep pinging me, I'm
here to help!

On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 08:49:30PM +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Apart from (at least!) weekly meetings with the mentors, either via
> our IRC channel (or somewhere else if more appropriate) we would like
> to encourage the students to *publicly* interact with the community.
> Ask questions on the mailing list and IRC, so that the rest of the
> community will be kept up to date and will be able to help you even if
> mentors will be temporarily offline.
> 
> Unless you have some issues of private nature that should not be read
> by everyone, please try to avoid sending private emails for technical
> discussions.

For this I would like you to get in contact with your mentor(s). Please
discuss how often you want to meet (once/twice a week for example) and
which communication method works best for you (Mail, IRC, IM, Skype,
...). Finding a regular meeting can be done off-list, but we'd like to
keep more communication on technical topics on the list this year – this
is a new change for us, so let's see how it will work out.


> I suggest that we create a new entry for 2017 at
>     https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeArchive
> and add the description of projects to
>     https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode2017

I have created these wiki pages. I'd like to encourage our students to
edit the description of their projects as they like. For example, if you
are going to blog about your progress, please add a link to your blog
from https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode2017.


Again, welcome to the project, and enjoy your summer with us!
-- 
Clemens