[Xapian-devel] Welcome GSoC 2014 students

[Olly Betts]

Welcome to Xapian and Google Summer of Code, and congratulations on being
accepted.

This email contains some information to help everyone get set up so that
things should go more smoothly, so please take the time to read it
carefully.

I have explicitly Cc-ed you all on this e-mail in case any of you
haven't subscribed to xapian-devel.  Please subscribe if you haven't
already, as I won't explicitly Cc future emails.

If you go to http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC2014/ you'll see we've
already set up projects pages for you which you should check over, add
missing data and correct anything we've got wrong.  You can add any other
links or information you think are helpful (but don't put things here
which should be checked into your git repo).

We've also set up a journal page for you to keep track of what you do.
We've found it really helpful in the past for students to keep a journal
of what they've worked on, ideally with an entry for every day.  It helps
mentors check quickly where you are when you need help, and is valuable
for you as students to record where you are against your project plan.

You can see the projects we've mentored in past years at
http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC - you'll notice that some have
considerably more information (for instance it's a good place to put an
updated timeline and project details), and that some chose to put their
journal in a blog recording the project (and in some cases that blog
has since been deleted, so unless you really want to keep it somewhere
else, keeping the journal on the wiki is preferred.)

As you're probably aware, we're now in the "community bonding period",
which is an interval of time before the official start of coding (some of
you are planning to start coding early to make up for exams or other
commitments during the coding period - if this is the case for you,
you should of course actually start coding when you planned to).

The community bonding period is where we should lay the foundations for a
success project:

 * Give everyone a chance to introduce themselves.

 * Fill out your project page on the Xapian wiki.

 * Do a final pass over your project and schedule before getting started;
   this may include any literature review that's required to verify the
   algorithms or approaches you're going to take.

 * Make sure you know how to talk to us and the rest of the community -
   we've found in the past that interacting on IRC well for GSoC, so
   we'd like to encourage that - if you find it useful, we can set you
   up with a "quasselcore" account so you can stay on IRC all the time
   without having to leave your own computer on.  Contact Olly for more
   info.
   
 * Ensure you have the code checked out and building (I think you all
   have already achieved this as part of the application process).

 * Get you up to speed with using git during development, and making
   patches (or github pull requests) for merging into the main Xapian
   repo for inclusion in a future Xapian release.

 * Get familiar with the coding standards we expect for contributions to
   Xapian.

To try to cover the last two points, we're going to try to have a few
online sessions over the next 2 weeks to work through the process.  This
is a new idea for this year, and we aren't sure how best to do this, but
the tentative plan is to have a session at a time which works for some of
you, and to turn the log from each session into a section in a document
others can use to catch up (and which will also be useful to developers
new to Xapian in the future).  More on this soon...

Cheers,
    Olly