GSoC Introduction and Project Discussions

[James Aylett]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 09:15:50PM +0530, Vivek Pal wrote:

> My name is Vivek Pal. I'm an undergraduate majoring in Computer
> Science Engineering at Delhi Technological University in New Delhi,
> India.

Hi, Vivek. Welcome to Xapian! Sorry you had some hesitation in
starting to talk to us; I hope we weren't off-putting in any way.

It sounds like you've come up with a good way of fitting writing your
proposal around your exams.

> Presently, I'm reading articles mentioned under Resources section of
> both project [weighting schemes and clustering] and I'll try to
> understand thoroughly all I can and will request to get all my
> doubts sorted in subsequent e-mails. Please guide me further for
> getting myself up to speed with the project.

It sounds like you're doing all the things I'd recommend: get Xapian
building on your machine, get familiar with both the source code and
the API, maybe make some small changes to Xapian to get familiar with
the process of that, and then start thinking about the specific
projects you're interested in.

Once you've read up on the background of the two projects you'll
probably have some more questions, but until then I don't think
there's anything else I'd recommend you do. (Particularly when you
have exams to do first!)

> Also, I was wondering that is it possible that these projects are
> already assigned to other students already on the account of their
> prior contributions?

No: GSoC projects aren't assigned until the end of the proposal
process. We'll look at all the applications at that point and decide
then who we want to work on each project.

> One thing I want to make a point on is the *extensive* and *very helpful*
> guidelines for anyone who wants to get involved in this project. I was able
> to build and install easily on my system. Thanks so much for putting
> together this documentation. I'm basically following guidelines on this
> page :-
> 
> https://xapian-developer-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/contributing/new-contributors.html

Good to know that was helpful for you -- it's early days for our
developer guide, so any feedback is useful. (And yes, if others
haven't read it, I'd recommend reading through what's up there. It's
not yet all in quite the right order, and there are bits missing, so
please ask questions if anything is unclear, and particularly if
anything it says doesn't work for you!)

J

-- 
  James Aylett, occasional trouble-maker
  xapian.org