[Xapian-devel] GSoC 2012 admin

[Olly Betts]

If you're one of our six selected GSoC students, please read through this
email and attend to anything which needs doing.  If anything is unclear,
please ask.

I've created a page on the wiki for each of the selected projects, which
are all linked from this overview page:

http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC2012

There's a table of useful information on each summary page.  Please check
that this is correct for you, and fill in the missing information.  For
most of you this is:

 * "work hours" - we realise you probably won't be working exactly the
   same hours every day, but it's useful for us to have some idea when we
   can expect you to be around.  We also encourage you to be on IRC in
   #xapian at least while you are working, as that will make interaction
   easier.

 * repository location - I've filled this in where I already know it, but
   for the rest of you please clone/fork our repository, push it to
   a public location, and put a link to that on your project's wiki page.
   There are already xapian git mirrors on gitorious and github, but any
   public hosting site is OK.  If you need help getting to grips with git,
   just ask - that's what we're here for.  Don't forget to actually push
   changes regularly (at least once a day is good) so there's a remote
   backup of your work, and so we can easily review your work.

 * Journal - this is for you to document your progress, which will help
   the mentors (and other interested people) to follow how you are doing,
   and is also likely to help you.  If you already have a blog, or would
   like to start one, then you can just post to that with a tag, or in a
   category, so that it's possible to just see the posts about the project.
   Then link to that from the wiki page (the trac wiki format for external
   links is:

   [http://blog.example.org/ Journal]

   If you'd prefer to just maintain the journal on the wiki, let me know
   and I'll create an outline for you, like the one we used last year.

   During coding, you should aim to make at least a couple of entries each
   week.  It doesn't need to be anything formal - just what you're working
   on, what you have recently completed, what obstacles you're frustrated
   by, etc.  Communication is an important part of your project.

 * Project plan - this is for the project plan part of your application
   - i.e. the bit which talks about the project and the timeline.  We want
   a publicly visible copy of this so that anyone in the wider Xapian
   community who is interested in the project can see it.  You can either:

    + Copy the proposal to the wiki.  We did this last year, and the
      main annoyance is that you need to reformat it to use trac's
      wiki syntax.

    + Mark your proposal as "public" in melange and link to it there.
      Note that this means that personal information in the proposal (like
      phone numbers, etc) will be public.  If you'd like to remove such
      things, ask Dan or me and we can record them elsewhere and allow you
      to edit the proposal.

    + Attach the proposal to the wiki in some other format.

 * Notes - this is intended as a place to note down any information which
   is useful to you and/or other people interested in the project, such
   as links to background information and other useful resources, TODO
   items, other notes, etc.  You may prefer to keep such information in
   a README in your code repository, in which case you can just link to
   that.

Feel free to create more sub-pages or links if you'd find them useful.

Each project has a "primary mentor".  One reason is because someone needs
to be in Google's system as your mentor, but they are also responsible for
making sure you do actually get a response to questions, and things like
that.  But we're intending to use a similar "group mentoring" approach as
we did last year, so you'll be expected to discuss issues and ask questions
in public via the #xapian IRC channel or on the xapian-devel mailing list.
This is better for you as it means you don't have to wait for one person to
be available to respond, and better for us as it makes it easier to keep
track of how everyone's doing.  Public communication is also the way open
source projects usually work, and GSoC is meant to give you experience of
working in an open source project.

If there's an issue you'd rather not disclose in public, then you can
either talk to your primary mentor, or to one of the admins (that's Dan
Colish and me).

"To do" summary:

* Set up your git repo (if you haven't already).

* Fill in missing info (and correct any errors) in your page under:
  http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC2012

Good luck with your projects, and we look forward to getting to know you
better over the course of the next few months.

Cheers,
    Olly (on behalf of the Xapian GSoC mentors)
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