Regarding GSoC

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Mihir,

On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 at 16:04, Mihir Luthra wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> @Mojca Miklavec I have been working on getting a good understanding of MacPorts base.
>
> My project would be trace mode optimisation.
> I feel I have come quite far in understanding the trace mode working in code.
>
> I have made plans on what I will do for the project and have started to understand the code base(well still working more).
>
> This project has been labelled as medium to hard.
> I think till the application period I will be able to give a good explanation on trace mode working and how I m planning to optimise it.
>
> If demo is needed in this, what are your expectations from the demo?

Other GSOC organisation usually ask students to submit pull requests
for various smaller bugs or features: that makes for a quite important
part of the selection process.

Our tickets are accessible from
    https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Tickets
and the most relevant for you would live in "Base Bugs" and "Base
Enhancements". Or
    https://trac.macports.org/roadmap
However I'm not sure which ones might be most suitable for looking
into as a newcomer, this might need some guidance from Marcus
(potential mentor), Clemens or someone else from the core team to make
the learning curve most efficient. (It could be that something that
would make most sense to start with is not even in the tracker.)

Demo mostly makes sense for the Django or Buildbot idea where we
hardly have any existing code to patch or improve. We would like to
see anything that can prove to us that you would be able to pull the
project through the summer.

I hope that Marcus will reply with something more reasonable than I
can provide you with. Clemens is also an expert in this field, but is
sadly too busy to be able to mentor this year, there are a few other
gurus here as well.

> If not, will it be enough to give a detailed explanation of my understanding and my plans in the application?

Last year we decided to make *any* coding challenge a necessary part
of application. Some students in other projects start with fixing
commas in documentation as their first PR :) and then proceed to more
challenging tasks.

If you believe that you more or less understand the problem, you can
also try with a PR for the first commit you would make if you started
working on the project right away (if that doesn't break the existing
functionality).

> Before you said we will have period from 25 march to 9 April for improving on our application?
> Will google let us reload our application or do I have to submit a rough application on here first so I can finalise with everyone here?

Google lets you resubmit the application as many times as you want. In
fact, you are probably not going to write the perfect application in
the first attempt anyway, so it's highly encouraged to keep improving
the application over the period. That said, access to the application
submitted to Google is only limited to registered mentors, and only
opens on the 25th of March. You can simply draft a document (in Google
docs, as some markdown document on GitHub, on your homepage ... or
basically anywhere where it suits you and where others can read it)
and share the URL with this mailing list. You can do this immediately
and hopefully get some useful feedback from us (probably not that much
from me as I'm not as familiar with this topic), giving you time to
improve the application, then send the next iteration etc.

You officially submit a draft application first, and unless you
finalise the submission, it won't even count. Even when you submit the
final version, you can still replace it with a better version until
the deadline.

Mojca