Ahmed: I think I already explained that you must write a few words every 10 days or so during the GSoC period on progress. You can plan your own work and how you want to spend your time on a day-to-day basis and the approach you take; but GSoC is supposed to be equivalent to a 3-month summer job and you should treat it as such. A few words every 10 days-ish is *not* optional.
Others: I got the impression that the current java binding is unmaintained and unmaintainable - please correct me if I am wrong. That said, there are possibly lessons to be learned from "what not to do", so I think it would be useful to open the floor for discussion about the current status of the java binding, what is good about it, what are the tools/functionalities available, and what are the "unfixable" problems, etc. I also got the impression that some assume a re-write (or an alternative implementation) would be better. My sentiments are probably summarised in somebody else's writing (http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html); or that something adopted in GSoC would automatically get done, and get done well by a lot of experienced people. Neither are the cases. Realistically, we should get "3-months x 2" of work from two smart students, by the end of the summer, that would be 2 additional language bindings; how much that would engage contributions from the non-students, or other parties, we'll have to see. The best case scenario would be some useable work to base further work on by the end of the summer. It is unlikely to replace existing work/usage wholesale after 6-student-man-months, however. Based on past experience, it is unrealistic to expect the student to continue much beyond the summer - school work, or "getting a real job", etc tend to come in. I have had one student who stated such honestly ('cannot see himself spending much time beyond'), and came back about 5 years later asking for another GSoC job - some countries have very long student lives - but that's rare. So 3-month is 3-month, please don't wishful-think that it will be a life-long dedicated commitment. It isn't. Also, the failure rate of GSoC is about 10-15% overall, and quite similiar in the linux foundation unbrella. About 1 in about 8 projects does not pass mid-way evaluation, or the final evaluation. Sometimes it is just "no show", student disappearing after the first payment, sometimes it is just excuses after excuses, or a lot of grand planning/design mission statements, without a single line of code to show; sometimes it is getting bog down to other things - e.g. a fictious scenario where the student spending a few weeks playing with git server configurations not essential to the work and/or could be solved in a few hours just by asking the right person/mailing-list, etc. To be honest, there are probably far more unsatisfactory projects than that 10-15%, mostly because mentors are reluctant to stop a "free" student from "possibly" contributing, even if all the signs are not good. So we may not necessarily have 2 useable new bindings by the end of the summer. _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
