> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrus Adamchik [mailto:andru..bjectstyle.org]
> Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 11:01 AM
> To: de..ayenne.apache.org
> Subject: Re: Summer of Code 2007
>
> Yep.
>
> BTW, Kevin, do you have any insights from the last year
> Google mentor summit that may be helpful for us this year?
>
> Andrus
I'm having a hard time thinking of anything truly insightful. However,
it would be beneficial to both students and mentors to come up with a
realistic way of completing these projects. I know you and I had very
different viewpoints on this, and it's unfortunate that there wasn't any
resolution on it. In fact, I think it may even be a fundamental issue
with the ASF process that puts significant hurdles in front of students.
A few of the problems that come to mind (numbered, but not necessarily
ordered):
1) Cultural differences (both regionally and organizationally) -- One of
my students didn't get out of school until about a full month after the
program started. It obviously created a fair amount of difficulty in
completing the project in a timely manner. Being in a distant timezone
hampered communications quite a bit as well. I found for one student,
instant gratification was something often sought after and that also
affected the way we communicated.
Organizationally, the ASF presents quite a shift from the way students
are accustomed to doing things. Teaching them new methods is of course
fine, but given the limited time given to start with, it minimized what
could actually be accomplished. Other differences are noted below.
2) Code contributions -- Students really should be given the proper
tools to do development, including an SCM. We don't just hand commit
privileges out, so this creates a bit of a divide. Last year, we
encouraged students to submit patches via JIRA, but this created more
problems than it resolved, IMHO. It's hard to provide a patch file for
truly new resources. And it's even harder to get students to submit a
patch to a patch (or update the old one) to meet our submission criteria
-- this is especially true if the student has a local development
environment that doesn't necessarily line up with a patch. What I found
is that the patches submitted for my projects tended to languish in some
odd state. They weren't quite ready to be committed, but the student
couldn't quite update them from their local dev environments because
they had added completely orthogonal bits of code since the time the
first patch was submitted. In my case, I ended up with large patches
consisting of the whole project that I had to try to review towards the
end of the project.
My recommendation would be to make an exception for SoC students from
the normal ASF process and create a branch for them that they can commit
against. Likewise, we should really enforce the signing of a CLA on the
outset.
3) Communication -- We promote mailing lists. One of my students last
year very much preferred the use of AIM. I encouraged the use of the
mailing lists throughout the whole summer, but it never quite happened.
I did, however, have plenty of IM conversations. So, on the one hand,
it sucked it wasn't "open", but on the other, I'd prefer that than no
communication at all.
Also, I'm not sure mailing lists for everything is most appropriate.
Regardless of how we treat things organizationally, to the student, the
assigned mentor is the mentor, not the dev list. I had many candid
conversations with one of my students that probably would have played
out very differently in a public forum. Being able to help the student
out in that manner was personally more fulfilling to me than serving as
a KB on cayenne internals.
All in all, I found the experience to be quite rewarding, although the
benefits to Cayenne as whole have yet to really be seen. I think
dealing with a lot of the logistical issues in advance would have made
life easier for student and mentor alike. I know we tried to deal with
some of them on the code-awards list last year, but there was no
concensus across projects.
I do have some suggestions on a few things, some of which are inspired
from the SoC conference last year, but I'll save those for a more
in-depth discussion.
Hopefully that long unintelligible rambling helps someone . . .
-- Kevin
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