[Soc-coordination] GSoC proposals for mentors.debian.net

[Gergely Nagy]

Hi!

First of all, apologies for the late reply, I had to spend a few days
playing ping-pong with my unconcious, as the damn thing refused to let
me know its ideas until I played with it.

Nicolas Dandrimont <nicolas.dandrimont at crans.org> writes:

[...]
> '''Semantic Package Review Interface for mentors.debian.net'''
>
> * "About mentors.debian.net"
>
> Debexpo (the software running on mentors.debian.net) is a collaborative
> package review tool. Debian as a community distribution, allows everyone
> to maintain packages in the archives. New contributors are supposed to
> go through a mentoring process, which includes reviewing packages made
> by a prospective contributor.

The last sentence sounds a bit weird to me, the end of it at least. I'd
think that cutting the sentence at "which includes reviewing packages",
and turning it into something like the following would make it easier to
read:

"New contributors are supposed to go through a mentoring process, which
- among other things - involves package review by more experienced
members of the community."

This way, you don't repeat the contributor word within the same
sentence, and mention by whom the packages are reviewed (more
experienced members - not neccessarily developers; and members of the
community, as one does not need to be a @debian.org person to contribute
useful review).

> Debexpo helps to host newly created packages and provides a review and
> management platform. Packages uploaded to Debexpo are being reviewed by
> experienced users and Debian Developers who will eventually upload them
> to official Debian archives.

I'd turn this into:

"Debexpo helps with this reviewing process, by allowing anyone to upload
prospective packages, request review and sponsorship, and in the end,
have one's package uploaded to the official Debian archives."

Though, I'm not entirely happy with the above either.

[...]

>  * '''Description of the project:'''
>
> Thorough reviews of packages made by less experienced maintainers,
> before they're uploaded to the main package archive, are key to
> maintaining the technical excellence of the Debian distribution.
> Unfortunately, the lack of manpower for package reviews extends the
> length of the process to a point that it is a recurrent source of
> frustration in prospective contributors.
>
> This project aims to simplify the package review process by providing a
> semantic review tool for source packages on the http://mentors.debian.net/
> website. This new review interface can in fact split in two subprojects:

s/(can in fact)/$1 be/; s/(split in)/$1to/

> The first subproject would be to gather a new set of semantic metadata
> (e.g. an uploaded package is python-based, a package uses a certain
> packaging helper, ...) on packages uploaded to Debexpo, using the
> available Debian QA tools or ad-hoc heuristics. This new semantic
> metadata should then be matched to the interests of sponsors and teams,
> which would be taught to the software either automatically (by looking
> at the upload history) or manually (with a set of tags). An automatic
> matching of sponsor and package traits should make the mentoring process
> easier and faster.

I'd expand on this, describing how this would make it easier for
sponsors to find interesting packages to look at and review. Mentioning
the huge diversity within debian, and the very different preferences and
requirements by sponsors and team might sound scary at first, but if
well put, also very interesting.

[...]

Before I move on to the rest, I'd like to say that I like both parts of
the proposal, but the two parts together seem too big to me, and I'd
suggest splitting them. Since the latter kind-of depends on the former,
and the former sounds more useful if only one would be implemented, I'd
keep that, and consider the latter for next year, or as a project the
student could do outside of GSoC, would s/he choose to remain involved.

This could also be emphasized in this case, that you have interesting
tasks after GSoC, so if the student is finished with the semantic stuff,
there's still a lot more to do, so he won't be bored during the winter,
either!

Other than this, I love the proposal, and I'd urge you to go forward
with it, and add it to the wiki[1], in either form (it can still be
refined n the next couple of days).

 [1]: http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2012/Projects

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