Eric Sunshine <sunshine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Perhaps it is time to mark this microproject as "taken" on the GSoC > page [2], along a fews others for which we have received multiple > submissions. > > [2]: https://github.com/git/git.github.io/blob/master/SoC-2014-Microprojects.md I actually have been of multiple minds on this. * After seeing that many candidates tried to solve the same micro, apparently without checking answers by other people, and seeing how they responded to the reviews given to them, I found that we had as equally good interactions with them to judge their skills, both techincal and social, as we would have had if each of them solved different micros. * Many reviewers may have gotten tired of seeing many novice attempts on the same micro over and over again, giving gentle suggestions for improvements. Because the _sole_ purpose of these micros were to help candidates get their toes wet in the process, duplicated efforts on the candidates' side are not wasted---they each hopefully learned how to interact with this community. But it is true that, if we were wishing to also get some trivial clean-ups in the codebase as a side effect of these micros, we have wasted reviewer bandwidth by not having enough micros, and reviewers may have had some feeling that their efforts did not fully contribute to improving our codebase, which may have been discouraging. Big thanks go to all reviewers who participated despite this. If we had more micros, the apparent wastage of the reviewer efforts might have been avoided. * Many candidates did not even bother to check if others are working on the same micro, however, which would be a bad sign by itself. Concentrating on one's own topic, without paying any attention to what others are working on the same software, is never a good discipline. Some may argue that it would be unfair to blame the candidates on this---they may have picked up micros that haven't been solved if we had more---but after seeing that many candidates' submissions apparently did not take into account the reviews given to others' submissions on the same micro and/or had many exactly the same issues like log message styles as submissions on other micros that have already been reviewed, I personally do not think they are blameless. So in short, yes it would have been nicer if we had more micros than candidates, but I do not think it was detrimental for the purpose of these micro exercises that multiple candidates ended up attempting the same micro. Again, Big Thanks to Michael for the excellent "micro" idea, and all reviewers who participated. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html