Dear GSoC participants,
this is a friendly reminder that the two important GSoC deadlines, the
soft pencils-down (on August 13th) and the firm pencils-down (on August
20th, followed by the final evaluation), are closing quickly.
The last week between the soft and firm deadline should be dedicated
primarily to making your existing code ready for merging, testing,
bug-fixing and writing documentation. You should re-evaluate your
priorities and focus on finishing stuff that contributes mostly to the
primary goal of your project and it is realistic to finish it, instead
of implementing new extra features and neglecting the core features or
devoting your time to features that require way more time than it is
available to finish.
Mind the following analogy: A car that is "almost running" (e.g. it is
missing two wheels or the steering wheel) is pretty worthless, as it is
_not_running_. On the other hand, a car that is only missing the radio
or the air conditioning can still run just fine and fulfil the primary
goal of a car. And if you are in a situation where your car is currently
missing the steering wheel and the roof, focus on the steering wheel and
not on the roof.
The suggested final steps before the firm pencils-down are:
* Scrub your code, remove all testing/debugging/temporary stuff
(especially if commented out), remove everything that is not intended
to be finished ever (failed trials, etc.). Clean-up the code so that
it really follows our coding style [1] and coding tips [2].
* Finish the documentation (our wiki [3] is probably the best place
where to write any standalone documentation), add proper comments to
the source code where necessary, add reference comments to public and
important functions (describing the purpose of the function,
its contract, input arguments, return value, etc.), add reference
comments to individual C files (describing what is the overall
purpose and structure of the file, any design notes, etc.).
* Make sure your branch compiles fine on all platforms (use the
tools/check.sh script) and do as much testing and debugging as
possible on all platforms you can easily run (not just on your
primary development platform).
* Merge the mainline branch into your branch, solve all possible
conflicts, remove all extra and unnecessary files.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them here. As
we would certainly like to see you around contributing to HelenOS even
after the GSoC wraps up, remember that for the purpose of evaluation we
can only consider what has been done until August 20th. Therefore these
last few days are crucial. Good luck!
[1] http://trac.helenos.org/wiki/CStyle
[2] http://trac.helenos.org/wiki/CodingTips
[3] http://trac.helenos.org/
M.D.
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