[gentoo-dev] Proposal for (next year's probably) SoC

[gentoo-dev] Proposal for (next year's probably) SoC

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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I think it could be useful to learn from other projects' handling of
SoC. The FFmpeg project has a list of "qualification tasks" for the
students to complete before they can accepted into SoC, as you can see
From [1].

The tasks are minor tasks that don't require a lot of time at hand, but
gives a good way to judge if the person is in for the experience or the
money, and might be able to cut the deal even for Gentoo devs if that is
really wanted.

How to implement it for Gentoo? Well I think we have the tool already:
Bugzilla. We just need to add a keyword SOC_QUALIFICATION_TASK; when a
developer think of a working qualification task, he can add the keyword
and CC the soc team or something like that.

Then the users can deal with the problems whenever they want, for the
next SoC, even during the year. When they submit their application, we
ask users to put the link to the bug that represented the qualification
task they completed.

To make the checking more easy, we could make sure that the person who
completed the task is listed in the Whiteboard, and that only Gentoo
devs can change that for the bugs for qualification task (letting only
devs opening them, or cloning the feature requests from user that become
a SoC qualification task, for instance).

Then get a tracker that is blocked by all the SoC qualification task
bugs, monitored by the SoC team, that can make sure how stuff is going
with the qualification tasks, and finally add a default query for the
tasks to the documentation about SoC.

I'm sure we can easily get some qualification tasks on; with a bit more
work we might also get qualification points (so that for instance minor
tasks alone can't cut the deal).

Maybe a bit complex, but I think it might be worth discussing.

[1] http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FFmpeg_Summer_Of_Code_2008

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal for (next year's probably) SoC

[Marius Mauch]

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On Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:07:37 +0100
flameeyes@gmail.com (Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò) wrote:

> The tasks are minor tasks that don't require a lot of time at hand,
> but gives a good way to judge if the person is in for the experience
> or the money, and might be able to cut the deal even for Gentoo devs
> if that is really wanted.
> 
> How to implement it for Gentoo? Well I think we have the tool already:
> Bugzilla. We just need to add a keyword SOC_QUALIFICATION_TASK; when a
> developer think of a working qualification task, he can add the
> keyword and CC the soc team or something like that.

While the concept itself is a good one, I think that such qualification
tasks have to be related to the proposed project to be of real use.
With a single codebase and a single implementation language like
ffmpeg a single list of tests can work, but Gentoo has many aspects that
require completely different skills. 
For us a generic list of tasks you may help in testing the motivation,
but it hardly helps to assess the technical skills of a student to
complete e.g. a webapp project if he fixes some ebuilds or writes a
patch for a random package.
I think we should just require students to list some references related
to their project in their application and have the relevant mentors
check those. If a student can't find some references on his own he can
the soc team/mentors/devs for something. In fact I think what is
needed most is improved communications instead of random tests.

Marius

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In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
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