Some thoughts about next GSoC

[Kai Blin]

On Friday 30 November 2007 12:30:56 Francois Gouget wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Nov 2007, Kai Blin wrote:
> [...]
> > I know some projects did an introductory quiz to figure out the student's
> > coding skills, I'm not convinced the knowledge needed for Wine can be
> > tested in a quiz. What do you think?
>
> Maybe just asking them to compile Wine and submit their include/config.h
> or make test results. This can be used to check that their config does
> not have big problems like a bad fontforge or 64/32bit issues that could
> cause them problems when they start their project.

Well, that's something we should take care of, ideally in the one-month period 
after being accepted and before the student is supposed to start working on 
SoC code.

> Asking them to submit conformance tests is an interesting idea too, but
> depending on the area it can be quite a bit of work. For some projects
> it may also not be possible to write relevant tests (e.g. we cannot test
> ExitWindows() or KDE/Gnome theme integration). But for those projects
> where it makes sense it could be a good idea.

Well, the way I'd like it to work is like this:

1. Student sends application draft to mailing list for review.
2. Wine developers with experience in the area covered by the application 
review the draft giving feedback. (Repeat steps 1 and 2 until application is 
suitable)
3. Students apply via Google web-app.
4. We contact students with request for a test case or the like.
5. Students send test case
6. Mentors review test cases, possibly asking for improvements (back to 5).

Of course, I'm afraid it's unlikely that it actually will work like that, at 
least if we define test case as something that will fit right into the wine 
test suite. But I think a test case like a simple program that will use parts 
of the API that should be implemented and works on windows should be 
sufficient, and people will want to have something like that anyway later.

I think it's also worth investing some time to help people get the initial 
code submission right. That's a point where we can teach people about code 
style, dos and don'ts, etc. If we get this right, it will benefit all the 
developers starting off with Wine, not only the SoC students.

Cheers,
Kai

-- 
Kai Blin
WorldForge developer  http://www.worldforge.org/
Wine developer        http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin
Samba team member     http://www.samba.org/samba/team/
--
Will code for cotton.
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