GSoC Application

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Mihir,

(CC-ing another student with a similar question and no particular
project proposal yet.)

Welcome to the MacPorts community!

On Thu, 21 Mar 2019 at 08:20, Mihir Luthra wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I had a few questions
>
> What all should I work upon before applying

- Decide on and discuss the idea for the project you want to work on.
- Get a decent understanding about how MacPorts works (get it up and
running, install a few ports etc.) and get a good understanding about
what you need to do to finish the project.
- Prove your skills by either creating some demo or submitting some
pull requests (you may ask for guidance about what you could do, but
it makes sense to first pick a project, so that the tasks can be more
related to the project).
- Make sure that you submit your first draft proposal *as early as
possible*, so that you can still have sufficient time (2 weeks) to
make significant improvements based on the feedback you get from us.
- Read this mailing list or archives where there will be plenty of
GSOC-related discussion going on, optionally follow us on IRC.

You may keep submitting patches also after submitting the application,
but discussing the idea is absolutely essential for success. You
should allow at least 10 days for proposal review & improvements,
ideally even more.

> and
> Will a mentor be assigned to me or do I need to discuss with the mentor and then submit proposal with mentor name mentioned?

You don't need to find a mentor yourself. The mentor would be assigned
to you based on the project idea (but yes, you definitely want to
discuss the idea before submitting the proposal, else you might be
wasting a lot of time going in the wrong direction instead of using
that time productively with some guidance).

You should not contact the mentor(s) directly, the ideas are best
discussed on this mailing list where other experienced developers can
also provide feedback, not just the potential mentor.

If you want some guidance, you might want to tell us a bit more about
yourself and your interests, and tell us which project ideas sound
interesting to you. Ideally you would do at least a tiny bit of
research into some ideas yourself (or ask if idea description doesn't
sound clear enough) and then come up with additional questions and
suggestions.

You could pick your idea in one of the following areas:
(a) working on new packages or improving existing ones (but that
requires taking on a bit more than just a single package, more like a
whole group of packages that need extra care; this could be done for
almost any given software in existence :)
(b) working on python modules for automatic generation of packages
from any "upstream package manager" to MacPorts, like conversion of
ruby gems / python pypi / perl cpan / haskell cabal / javascript npm /
... (no need to work on all of them, just some subset)
(c) working on any of the plenty projects that improves the package
manager itself (C/C++ and Tcl)
(d) standalone web application and improvements to our build infrastructure

Projects in (c) are relatively important and you may pick almost
anything, even if it's not on the project list, but any other area is
suitable as well. So far there was probably most interest in (d), so
you might want to pick from others?

Mojca