On 03/03, Duy Nguyen wrote: > On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 10:09 PM Thomas Gummerer <t.gummerer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I'm not very familiar with what's required here, but reading the above > > makes me think it's likely too much for a GSoC project. I think I'd > > be happy with a project that declares removing the global variables as > > the main goal, and adding parallelism as a potential bonus. > > > > I'm a bit wary of a too large proposal here, as we've historically > > overestimated what kind of project is achievable over a summer (I've > > been there myself, as my GSoC project was also more than I was able to > > do in a summer :)). I'd rather have a project whose goal is rather > > small and can be expanded later, than having something that could > > potentially take more than 3 months, where the student (or their > > mentors) have to finish it after GSoC. > > This is why I'm not involved in GSoC. I often mis-estimate the size of > work (and yes I would still like your tree-based index format in, > can't remember why it never made it). So do I, and that's why I'd like to err on the side of having smaller projects :) I think the main reason the tree-based index format never made it is that the in-core APIs were not set up to make use of the new index format. I'm also still interested in getting it in, but I haven't found the time for looking at making the index code pluggable yet. It would probably take a similar refactoring as with the refs code to get this done. All that said, GSoC was still a great experience for me, and I got to learn a ton over the summer. But I did feel like I let the people that invested a lot of time in the project as well down a bit, by not being able to finishing the project. And having the feeling of accomplishment of actually finishing a project would definitely have been nice to have as well. So for those reasons I think it would be better for students to take on smaller projects. > So yeah if you find removing global variables (which essentially > identifies shared states, a prerequisite for any parallel work) > reasonable for GSoC, I'd say go for it. > > Be also aware that this kind of refactoring work could result in lots > of patches and it takes time to get them merged, if your GSoC goal is > to get merged. > -- > Duy
