Re: New Emacs features via Google Summer of Code (or other similar stipend schemes) (was: as for Calc and the math library)

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Eli, have you considered using GSC to get volunteers for implementing
>> some moderately difficult Emacs features? Since GSC provides financial
>> incentive, it may be possible to get student volunteers.
>> 
>> Of course, someone still needs to mentor the students, but that's less
>> effort compared to actually writing all the code.

> I can only say that it would be harder for a casual contributor to do
> a GSoC-style job for Emacs than for other projects, because Emacs has
> a lot of specialized needs and requirements that take time to learn.
> But maybe this is not an obstacle.

May you elaborate?
The interested students will likely also be at least casual Emacs users.
So, some degree of familiarity is expected.
Other than that, how is Emacs dramatically different from working with
any other large codebase?

> People, including the other co-maintainers, are welcome to pursue
> this, but I personally have no free time or resources to do that.

Adding Stefan and Andrea to CC.

To add more details, FSF/GNU qualifies as a valid mentor organization
for GSoC. Org mode project even participated in it in the past:
https://orgmode.org/worg/archive/gsoc2012/orgmode-gsoc2012-ideas.html
AFAIR, there was a request from GNU this spring to submit proposals.

So, what I am talking about is not a theoretical idea. It can be done.

What is needed is a formulation of projects/features that are desired.
Mentors do not have to be maintainers. Experienced Emacs contributors
can be the mentors (also, mentoring a student can be a good addition to
some types of CVs).

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
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