Re: GSoC 2013

[chad <yandros@MIT.EDU>]

On 05 May 2013, at 08:48, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
> It's really bad form to have
> the student participating in the slot request process on a public
> list, don't you think?

Not really, no. It's only a potential problem with the politics of
who or what gets chosen when resources are tight. "2 essential of
2 slots" is not such a situation, there's no `vote' over which
student projects get mentored, and even if there were, I seriously
doubt anyone would vote against Stefan mentoring a project to improve
vc. This is `bad form' only in a theoretical alternate universe.

> Note I don't blame Fuqiao.  Although I don't know his work in detail,
> he seems to be precisely the kind of student that GSoC wants to
> support, engaged in Emacs development and likely to continue.  But
> that Emacs is so disorganized as a GSoC subproject that he could
> actually come to the point of posting such a thing speaks volumes
> about Emacs (as a GSoC subproject).

Meh. GSoC is not a school, even though they borrow the terminology
`student' and `mentor'. They're looking to support motivated
mentor-ees with initiative. That seems like exactly what happened
here.

Every year around the GSoC deadline there's some form of complaint
that there wasn't enough or the right kind of process around getting
GSoC students and mentors for Emacs, and that it's a shame that the
potential was wasted. GSoC is an effort to help get potential hackers
hacking, not to outsource programming needs to cheap labor. Anyone
who actually wants to see Emacs get more involved in GSoC needs to
start putting in organizational effort (creating process, identifying
projects, recruiting students, recruiting mentors, etc) *before*,
not *at* the deadline.

~Chad

P.S. Sorry for the rant.