[Dropped -vote] On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 08:48:33PM +0000, Wolodja Wentland wrote: > [...] > Would you mind elaborating on this? The background to this is that I am > currently considering mentoring the "Leiningen & Clojure packaging" project > [0] and your comments make me think twice about commiting to this. I thought > that the proposal has merit and would allow an interested student to gather > valuable insights into Debian and its packaging infrastructure or tooling. > > [0] > http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2013/Projects#Leiningen_.26_Clojure_packaging
I chose not to be involved this year in GSoC so I can not tell you if this year "packaging proposals" are welcome or not. You need to talk with this year's admins. What I can give you are my personal thoughts about why I think this kind of projects are usually not the best idea to be done inside the GSoC from a mentor POV, but rather in a more traditional Debian mentorship approach in learning how to package and maintain software in Debian. GSoC is about getting students spending their summer contributing to free software and not in another kind of jobs (see the motto: "flip bits not burguers"). In most of the cases, the students don't have previous experience in free software development. But this is not always the case, of course. The students get with this program the opportunity to learn about free software or improve their skills while the mentoring organization is given the opportunity to recruit new contributors or train contributors in new areas. If you happen to have a proposal from a student who has interest in Debian, most likely a Debian or Debian derivative user already, and has interest in Clojure, as in already have some knowledge in how to code in the language or at least LISP... Then you will spend your summer training somebody who is likely to stuck in the clojure packaging team after the summer, because the student benefits of this work. That time you have invested will be worth it, even the times it took you more time helping the student that doing the task yourself. This is clearly a win-win, and in this case, mentor a project like this without hesitation. In a most likely scenarios, the student only has interest in Debian or Clojure and while they might stick around Debian after their project is over working in another area, it's very unlikely. There are plenty of possibilities here that come to my mind here, but this email would be too long. If your thoughts are: well, even if the student doesn't stick after the summer, somebody will have done this stuff I wanted done. Then you're effectively falling in the case "Debians contributor who want somebody doing an item of their TODO list". And even worse, you will have invested in the student almost the time that would have taken you doint it yourself... So from the mentor perspective, your time is better invested mentoring people who want to have clojure in Debian because they are both clojure and Debian users. Those power users in this area who would love start contributing to Debian. You have a bigger pool of interested people and you don't need to restrict yourself to mentoring one single person. >From my point of view, with non-packaging projects this is different, because if they get interested and enjoy working in Debian, they can keep contributing more or less frequently with code, patches, code reviews, etc. While package maintenance puts a burden on the student they are unlikely to be interested after (unless they are, as said before, users of this software in first place). HTH, Ana _______________________________________________ Soc-coordination mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination
