Hi, On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Shawn O. Pearce wrote: > Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> wrote: > > On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Andreas Ericsson wrote: > > > > > Just chiming in that I can probably help mentoring whoever goes with > > > libgit2. I do not have enough spare time for me to promise that I > > > can be there as much as I think is necessary and proper, but I'll > > > gladly help out. > > > > I don't know if I like co-mentoring; I always had the impression that > > this does not work all that well. > > I haven't tried it myself, so I can't comment. I thought though that > Daniel and Christian's mentoring went rather well, but maybe that's just > me. That impression came from a few conversations at the mentor summit, BTW. I cannot really comment on C & D... as Christian pointed out, they are still a bit secretive, even long after the official end of the project. However, I have to mention that some projects (SIP communicator for example) made it a _requirement_ to have pairs of mentors. But then, they had the "disappearing mentor" syndrome already, so who can blame them for that. > This year I may not be able to be a mentor for GSoC. Pity. But you started the preparation for the new application, thank you very much. Will you be able to be administrator again? > Heh. I'd wager the most successful GSoC project was Marek's push > support for JGit. Having ObjectWriter available has opened up the doors > to support a lot of code in JGit, like the full protocol suite, and > bundles. Without it I wouldn't have gotten as far as I did in Gerrit. > > In terms of value, to me as a contributor, Marek's work gave me a > foundation we could build on and get stuff done. Miklos' merge is > great, but I don't think we gained nearly as many features as we did > with Marek's contribution. > > Anyway, I don't want to get into a "my student was better!" contest. Hehe. I am very proud that we are able to hold such a contest. > I just think that we had a very successful year this year, with a > few really great projects being contributed to the community as a > result of our students' hard work. > > > The _communication_ should be open, and much of it on the mailing list, I > > agree, but _only_ after the student is familiar enough with the aspects of > > her project (including some familiarity with the source code). > > > > I will _not_ force a student to ask questions openly that he finds > > embarassing. > > I agree. The first few weeks are really critical to the student. They > are still trying to find their way around the code base and don't want > to look like an idiot. Nobody wants to look like an idiot, especially > in public, and especially when they have been "hired" to do a particular > job. > > But... part of the reason GSoC exists is to get students involved > in open source. The rest of us don't come to Git with mentors we > can ask the "stupid" questions to. We come here and have to ask > what we need to ask, on the public mailing list, complete with > archives for the rest of time. As mentors we should be trying to > encourage our students to work in this, or any other, open source > community. I do not think that both of your paragraphs contradict each other. Many students need a bit of hand-holding until they realize that everybody is cooking with water. At the end of the day, everybody has some brilliant and some stupid ideas. But it takes some getting used to to voice ideas in public, risking some friendly jokes about your mental state or the quality of your smokables. I actually see a lot of value in GSoC as a tools to get more students through that period, especially students from parts of this planet whose culture is so different from the "Western" culture shaped by TV, consumism and the lack of physical insecurity, that they are rather intimidated by the ways of Open Source. > GSoC is about getting these folks _involved_, so that 40 years from now, > open source is just as viable as it is today. It will probably take over even more of our world. Ciao, Dscho -- 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
