On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 1:44 PM, Ross Gardler <rgard...@opendirective.com> wrote: > On 21 July 2011 10:24, Bertrand Delacretaz <bdelacre...@apache.org> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 8:44 AM, Luciano Resende <luckbr1...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >>> It looks like various Apache projects are voting GSoC students as >>> "partial committers". As Apache does not have a formal process for >>> handling this type of account requests, regular accounts are created >>> for these students, with an Apache e-mail alias, and access is given >>> to general committer areas in SVN (e.g. committer area in svn, etc) >>> and then respective PMCs provides write access to particular areas in >>> SVN, such as a sandbox or a collaboration area. If the student fails >>> the GSoC programm, or is not elected as regular committer during or >>> after the program, there is no process for disabling/deleting these >>> accounts. This is very problematic and can cause multiple issues.... >> >> I'd say those are temporary accounts rather than partial, and from the >> GSoC point of view I think it's good to have them. > > As long as we ensure they are really temporary I agree. > > Personally I feel that GSoC students should earn commit access just > like anyone else. However, being a mentor is a time consuming task and > we have to balance mentoring effort against the payback they get. We > can also argue that the evaluation process is, when done right, is > almost as rigorous as the process of becoming a committer. > > I think it is important to ensure mentors and PMCs get to choose the > way they work with GSoC students. Personally I will still require > students to submit regular patches but I don't feel we should dictate > that practice. >
That's my view as well, one of the ideas is that the GSoC will give the student experience working on open source, and I don't believe the regular open source experience is to give write access to source repository for every initial contributor. Having said that, I have seen others say that they want to provide write access to the students, but then this access should be restricted to a branch or to a isolated code, to me, this still isolates and don't foster integration with the project community that will be paying much more attention and reviewing contributions to the trunk. In the past, most of the students I mentored ended upping getting committership on the projects they participated after a initial period of patches contributions and community interaction. Having said that, I'm yet to really receive any complaints and requests from the GSoC Students where they say they are not being productive by providing patches, etc... So i tend to think this is a way for the mentors to avoid having to review and apply patches. >> One suggestion would be to add those accounts to a special LDAP group >> named "trainee" or something. Once GSoC ends, someone (GSoC admins or >> comdev PMC) would need to request infra to disable all of them. If a >> student is voted in as a committer in the meantime, their PMC chair >> would just remove them from the "trainee" group. > > +1 > +1, I think that, for those projects that want to provide these accounts for the GSoC students, this is a good process with the addition that they shouldn't have access to committer area as suggested by Kathey. -- Luciano Resende http://people.apache.org/~lresende http://twitter.com/lresende1975 http://lresende.blogspot.com/
