On Oct 2, 2009, at 12:02 PM, Isabel Drost wrote:
Hello,
as explained some weeks ago, I am planning to do a Mahout course at TU
Berlin that involves a theoretical seminar as well as a coding
project.
I imagine a setup where small groups students are working on tasks
- comparable to the GSoC setup* - implementing features end-to-end
(including tests, javadoc, documentation, examples etc.) I cannot
guarantee for anything but ideally I would wish for the results to get
back into Mahout.
I would like to avoid submission of "monster-patches" and get students
to learn to interact with version control (git, svn...). Obviously we
cannot give each student commit access. On the other hand I do not
want
to take development out of Mahout to some github project - would work
but than the Mahout community would not be able to monitor progress.
Is
there any way for those students to work in some sort of sandbox area?
Any other suggestions? Could github be a viable way to go with patches
being broken into reasonably small pieces and submitted to JIRA?
I don't know that there is, at least not initially. Unfortunately,
AFAIK, the ASF doesn't have any mechanism for this kind of thing. The
ASF only views contributions as being from individuals and only
individuals can be given commit rights based on their merit and the
filing of a CLA. Over time, as the students contribute and if it
meets our guidelines, they of course could be granted commit rights,
but I don't know of anyway up front, as we don't really have a way of
saying a branch is just for playing around in. They, of course, would
need to file an iCLA as well. Presumably, however, part of the class
is learning how open source works. So, for better or worse, the way
the ASF works is through patches via JIRA.
That being said, you might bring up your question at code-awards@
(where GSOC is often discussed) or community@ and see if we can
brainstorm within the broader ASF community.
HTH,
Grant
