GSoC Proposal: Rewrite key parts of MacPorts in Python

[Joshua Root]

On 2020-4-3 04:52 , Jackson Isaac wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
> 
> Thanks for your valuable insights and I really appreciate the detailed
> feedback. I didn't realize these things before and the efforts that
> went into creating and maintaining such a great project.
> 
> I sincerely apologize to the community and also to the student for my
> ignorance and the fact that I didn't discuss this before in detail on
> the mailing list and understand the implications that it would make
> before putting anything on the ideas page.
> 
> It was a pre-mature action from my side, and my intention was not to
> hurt anyone. This was also a learning for me personally to not put
> things in place without much thought, discussion and understanding.

I would say it's OK for a GSoC project to be completely original and
never discussed before; the problem with this one is just the scope. You
would need to spend the entire summer (if not more) just doing design in
order to do it right, but the primary assessable output of the project
is code. Naturally you need to do some design before you code, and other
tasks like documentation of the code, but you need to write the code.

It's also OK for a GSoC project to have research elements. A successful
project may produce code that never actually gets put into production --
maybe in the course of implementation it becomes clear that the entire
approach is flawed. Learning that is still valuable.

In this particular case, if the student can suggest a subset of the
project with a small enough scope to be completed over the summer, that
will still produce working code, it could be considered. I have no idea
what that would look like, but it may be possible. As Ryan implied, an
important question is "Which parts should be rewritten in Python, and why?"

- Josh