On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Rob Lanphier <robla(a)robla.net> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Chad
<innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm with Aryeh on this one. I can't
really commit to full-time being able
to mentor someone--I have work, school, et cetera--but I'm around
often enough to be able to lend a hand or two if needed. Plus if we get
our students on IRC, they'll have the benefit of real-time feedback from
many developers, not just their mentor.
Absolutely! I think it's going to be exceptionally important to encourage
students to be active on IRC and generally visible in the community.
And this is where we've seen a difference. Some people like Jeroen have
really integrated themselves, hanging around, asking questions, becoming
a part of the community. I'd like to see our developer community grow as
a result of GSoC, not just have people show up for their few months and
then disappear when it's over.
I'm also with Trevor in saying that I'd only
like to work on projects that
have some tangible benefit to a larger group of
people (ie: deployed
on WMF sites, or a major new feature for MediaWiki users in general).
GSoC has been really hit or miss with our community over the past
few years. Whether it's lack of resources, or burnout, or who knows,
but the ROI of developer time has been smaller than I think we'd like
to see. We've had some great students in the past who've done some
stellar work, and we've also had projects that went nowhere and ended
up bitrotting somewhere. I think we'd all like to avoid the latter.
I put together a page of past projects here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_Past_Projects
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_Past_Projects>Could people
that know what the true latest status of all of these projects go in and
fill out what they know? That will help us figure out what the
characteristics of a project that's likely to be successful will be.
I updated some of the ones I know about.
I suspect that projects that involve integrating large
blobs of non-PHP code
into MediaWiki are the most troublesome. They sound cool on the surface,
but probably end up being a little bit like strapping a jetpack onto a cat
("what could possibly go wrong?"). Self-contained extensions without
outside dependencies seem the most likely to have long-term benefits, as
well as very carefully scoped tweaks to the core (e.g. improvements to
lesser used special pages).
Rob
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Extensions are easy to write and review, sure. And I'm certainly fine
with normal core code changes too, as long as they follow coding
conventions and pass code review. But larger scope changes (typically
anything involving the phrase 'rewrite X') are much harder to review, and
I think should be avoided. We want projects that have visible results and
trying to do large-scale changes sets people up for failure.
-Chad