Hi Damon, Thank you so much for floating your GSoC ideas early here on the mailing list! Putting out concrete examples we can weigh in on is really helpful, and engaging in this way is a fantastic way of demonstrating how you'll be able to engage with us if we select your project.
On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 1:06 AM, Damon Wang <damonw...@uchicago.edu> wrote: > I'm interested in porting texvc to Python, and I was hoping this list > here might help me hash out the plan. As I'm sure you've already gathered from the other responses, this is exactly the right place. I'm a little skeptical myself that porting that particular piece of code from OCaml to Python is going to be a really big win for us (because it's still a "foreign" language as far as PHP-based MediaWiki is concerned, so integration is still a little clunky and performance may take a hit due to yet another interpreter needing to load), but I'll let others weigh in on whether I'm making too big a deal about that. Stepping back from the specifics of your proposal (which I think the others on this list have responded to pretty well), I'd like to find out more about what general sorts of projects interest you the most, which may help us figure out if we should keep going in this direction. Some questions: 1. Are you most interested in having a Python-based project, or would you be *equally* happy and productive programming something in PHP? 2. Are you zeroing in on <math> parsing and parsing in general because that's an area that you're already developing expertise in and/or are deeply interested in getting into, or is that just something that looked kinda interesting to learn about relative to other opportunities you considered? 3. Are you coming at this as someone who is already deep into Wikipedia/MediaWiki usage who is looking to resolve particular things (like <math> parsing) that are painful as an end user, or are you more casually involved and more interested in applying in this project because it looks like we've got a lot of interesting programming problems to solve? Just to be really clear, I'm not looking for a "right" answer on any of those questions. It's not necessary for you to be even interested in getting deeply involved in the Wikipedia user community to have a really successful project. The purpose of this line of questions is to figure out if we should continue helping you refine your current idea, or suggest some other direction that's a bigger payoff and/or easier sell. Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
