GSoC

[Marcus Calhoun-Lopez]

Greetings Vibhansh,

We are glad to hear about your interest in the MacPorts project.

A few questions.
Are you familiar with Tcl?
It is not mandatory, you can pick up what you need fairly quickly.
Are you familiar with MacPorts?
Again, it is not mandatory, it just helps to know how much vocabulary we can initially use.

I think the best advice I can give at this point is to develop a history of code, reliability, and working with other developers.
Some possible suggestions to get you started:

* You said you were invested in improving the Command Line Tool UX.
   Perhaps take *one* aspect of that and see if you (with help from other developers) can implement it.
   For example, just adding color (red for errors, yellow for warnings, etc.) might be a reasonable place to start.

*  Choose some outdated ports and try to update them [1].
   Running “port livecheck maintainer:nomaintainer” give a (very long) list of outdated unmaintained port.
   You could try to update a few of them.
   This would also get you a little more acquainted with Tcl if you are not already.

*  Choose some tickets [2] and try to fix them.
   Some tickets are open for a long time because they are difficult.
   However, some tickets are still open just because no-one has put any effort into fixing them.
   For example, “Base should know the installed version of the command line tools” [3] is fairly easy to fix.
   There is a PortGroup that already does much of the heavy lifting [4].
   I just have not gotten around to incorporating the PortGroup into the base code.

There are just a few possible options.
Feel free to contribute your own ideas.

-Marcus

[1] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode#orphanports
[2] https://trac.macports.org/report/1?sort=created&asc=0&page=1
[3] https://trac.macports.org/ticket/56318
[4] https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/blob/master/_resources/port1.0/group/cltversion-1.0.tcl

> On Mar 7, 2020, at 3:23 PM, Vibhansh Gupta <vibhanshg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi there !
> 
> I’m Vibhansh. A Tech Enthusiast who has become very interested, after reading through the project description and requirements, to work towards to goal, "Improving the Command Line Tool UX” (in GSoC 2020 for MacPorts and perhaps even further down the road).
> 
> As for my experience and programming skills, I am glad to inform you that I have been working thoroughly in Python for over 2 years now. I know that there will be many candidates showing an interest to aim for improving the UX but I would like to point out why I would be the better choice. Yes, it will probably be true that I may not be the best programmer but why I’d be specifically the best choice for this project can be explained in twofolds :
> 1. I am very fluent with understanding code. I pick up coding terms quicker than most and can see the structure as well as the code to come to the conclusion about what parts are relating to which feature. I think this will help me identify the relevant parts for the UX editing.
> 2. In any project that I pursue, I give the utmost emphasis on creating the best User Experience or if it is a Web-based project, I give User Interface the most priority. It’s an obsession, really. With that in mind, I would like to point out that I will be more than happy to undertake any sort of User Experience improvement project for the MacPorts Community.
> 
> A few tips of guidance would be deeply appreciated as I try to step forth and (hopefully) contribute toward’s your goal.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Vibhansh.