GSoC 2019 - trace mode improvements

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Davide,

On Sun, 7 Apr 2019 at 12:55, Davide Gerhard wrote:
> On Sunday, 07/04/2019 11:55 CEST, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> > On Sun, 7 Apr 2019 at 09:40, Davide Gerhard wrote:
> >>
> >> Sorry, I am late but I saw only the other day that MacPorts
> >> participate to the Google Summer of Code.
> >
> > Maybe we should be doing a better job in marketing :(
> > Any advice on how the message could have reached you (provided that
> > you have contributed before) would be greatly appreciated.
>
> it was you on github issue about mercurial.

Yes, I'm aware of that, but even in that case it was only you who has
been notified (a bit late), there could still be other contributors
who are / were not aware about GSOC. (Those subscribed to the mailing
list couldn't have missed the news, and we received request to move
the discussions elsewhere. We might need to set up something like
Slack in fact, but we have never in history received so many proposals
from students, so we were kind of caught by surprise this year.)

My question is: what would we need to have done in order for the news
to have reached you one month (or more) ago?

We have absolutely no idea which contributors are qualifying students,
so that we could notify them individually.

We had a notification on the first page of the website (which is
admittedly too boring to ever visit) and it was impossible to miss it
for anyone subscribed to the development mailing list, but there are
certainly other ways to reach the target population.

> > Previous contribution to the project definitely brings you "extra
> > points", but the time left is super scarce, so you need to use it
> > well.
> >
> >> Any comment will be appreciate.
> >
> > I'm not familiar with the topic, so I cannot really advise you, but:
> >
> > (1) Please get subscribed to the development mailing list.
> >
> > (2) Please carefully read the archives at
> >     https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-dev/
> > in particular those from March and April this year.
> >
> > (2.a) There is quite a bit of extra information about trace mode on
> > the list already.
>
> read [1] and related thread and probably I am too late to contribute through
> GSoC. So I give up.

It's entirely up to you whether you read and treat the response as a
discouragement or as a challenge. One definite way to not get selected
is by not even trying.

As I said, being a previous contributor is certainly an advantage you
have over those who have never even used MacPorts before, but not
enough on its own. You still need to know what exactly you are
proposing to implement and prove in some way that you can do it. The
proposal needs to contain sufficient details that it's clear to the
mentors that you know what you are talking about. What you sent now
doesn't contain anywhere near sufficient details.

If you only start studying the topic after you send the final
proposal, it could happen that you realise that what you propose is
not even feasible to do in the given timeframe ;)

Mojca