Re: RISC-V port for GSoC?

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> To give some context, the issue is about the RISC-V port item at
> <https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/GSoC-2018>.
>
> I’m happy to help with Guix porting insight, but apart from that I’m not
> the most qualified person and I’d rather have someone else mentor it, if
> someone were to take this project.  Any takers?
>
> Actually I’m unsure how good of a project it is for GSoC.  GSoC is about
> development, but this one is not so much development, as Ricardo wrote
> in the context of Outreachy.

It’s difficult to mentor a project like that; a consequence is that it
doesn’t really fit into the framework of GSoC, where mentors need to
have some way of deciding if the student is still on track (and fail the
student if necessary).

For a project that is “follow the instructions” in the best case and
“wait for upstream to fix it” in the worst case, I really don’t feel
comfortable having this as a GSoC project.  Problems encountered in the
porting effort are unforeseeable and could be outside the student’s
means to work around them — what do we do then?  Fail the student?  Pass
them by default?  It doesn’t really make sense to me to have a project
that has big unknowns as dependencies.

My opinion is to remove it from the list of GSoC ideas.

> (RISC-V porting in itself does sound useful to me, just somewhat
> unsuitable for GSoC.)

Same here.

--
Ricardo

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