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

[Nicolas Dandrimont]

Le 29/02/2012 à 10:53, Gergely Nagy <algernon at balabit.hu> écrivit :
> 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.

Hi,

Thanks for your review, and for your enthusiasm!

> 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).

I went with your formulation on the wiki page, thanks.

> > 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.

I reworded this a little when making the wiki page, but kept the gist of it.

> [...]
> 
> > * '''Description of the project:'''

[...]

> > 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.

I had a hard time expressing this, so I didn't. :) I agree that the
proposal should be expanded to tell this.

> [...]
> 
> 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!

We (as in the mentors.d.n people) were not quite sure that the two
subprojects would fit in a single GSoC project. I therefore applied your
idea of only keeping the first subproject as our GSoC project.

I hope that the student taking on the debexpo project will in fact
continue to contribute in the future (yeah, let's be optimistic). We
will discuss amongst ourselves how to formulate the work to be done
inside the debexpo project. We do have a wikipage already[1], but it's a
bit stale and needs some love :). When the page will be in a better
shape, we can link to it from the GSoC proposal.

We could also use that wikipage to propose "bite-sized" work for
prospective students to do to evaluate their prior knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Debexpo/Development

> 
> 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

I've done that. Again, thanks for your enthusiasm, let's hope it all
works out for the best!

Cheers,
-- 
Nicolas Dandrimont