Re: [gnu-soc] [IMPORTANT] Next steps for participating projects and mentors

[Darshit Shah]

Hi,

I can understand that it is difficult to bring a project back from 
inactivity. However, remember that with just two developers, you also 
need to maintain all that new code that will come in. Do not discount 
the recurring cost of maintaining old software.

On top of it, I see that you have only two mentors this year and 4 
potential slots. The official recommendation is 1 mentor per student. 
Mentoring students is not an easy task and takes away quite some time 
and energy. And I say this after ~6 years of experience mentoring 
students for my project. We never take more than 1 student / mentor.
It is for this exact same reason that Google also limits new 
organizations to just 1 slot for the first couple of years.

On 4/20/20 11:33 AM, Diogo Peralta Cordeiro wrote:
> Hey!
>
> I'm really sorry to learn about this. GNU social was inactive for quite 
> a long time (measurable in years). Some activity has been restored in 
> 2018 and we've since been depending heavily on GSoC to recover and 
> attract both new contributors and users.
>
> We are making some good progress and yet we still don't have that many 
> devs (in 2018 we had 1 student (me), last year we had 2 students, now we 
> have 6 great applicants from which we would really like to have 4).
>
> Our repository's truly active moments have been these summers and we're 
> trying to generate some active momentum. This summer we're counting on 
> heavily upgrading the codebase and achieve that. Please understand that 
> I'm not suggesting that we need or are depending more on this than the 
> other GNU projects. It is not our intention to "play unfairly", it's 
> just being hard in our community to get things moving and to maintain 
> this as a relevant project after so many years of inactivity.
>
> As all our current active devs are students (a total of 2 devs), we've 
> defined quite an high entry barrier to ensure the code still meets our 
> "good software" requirements - for instance, one of the applicants has 
> already pushed 48 difficult commits. We're already rejecting any 
> application that is below "amazing", since we don't have enough mentors 
> nor time. All these 4 applications are really required to achieve our goal.
>
> > Please set LilyPond's number back to 1/2 if social and/or guix change 
> > their requests in any way.
> Therefore, we can increase the desired to 5 and potentially have one 
> more student with us, if you think that would help.

This is a really cheeky thing to do. When people are asking you to scale 
back and play fair, you decide to increase the number of slots you request?

> Sorry about requesting so many slots, but we really need this to keep up 
> with competing software, which doesn't follow the GNU philosophy,

I kindly ask you to reconsider your stance. Everyone needs the slots. We 
can't force you to make any changes, but remember your actions affect 
not just you but all the other projects under the GNU umbrella.

> ---
> Diogo Peralta Cordeiro
> Developer
> GNU social
> https://www.diogo.site/
>
> On 2020-04-20 08:25, Darshit Shah wrote:
> > I agree with Urs here.
> >
> > I would request all the projects to reconsider their requests. 
> > Tomorrow is
> > the last day for making slot requests. The difference between 
> > "essential" and
> > "desired" is which projects you absolutely want to mentor this year 
> > vs. which
> > projects you would like to but are currently unsure of or can live 
> > without.
> >
> > It is highly unlikely that for everyone each project is an absolute 
> > essential.
> >
> > On 4/20/20 9:05 AM, Urs Liska wrote:
> > > Hi Jose,
> > >
> > > may I suggest then that everybody reconsiders their decisions. I can't
> > > really imagine how *all* groups only have "essential" slot requests.
> > >
> > > Best
> > > Urs
> > >
> > > Am Montag, den 20.04.2020, 08:50 +0200 schrieb Jose E. Marchesi:
> > > > Hi Urs.
> > > >           so far none of the groups who have asked for more than one 
> > > > made a
> > > >      differenciation between essential and desired slots.
> > > >      I am actually rather skeptical on the numbers requested by the
> > > > maintainers.
> > > >
> > > >      Therefore we have decided to go along with that trend in order
> > > > not to
> > > >      get burnt for playing fair. So please change the slot requests
> > > > for
> > > >      LilyPond from 1/2 to 2/2.
> > > >
> > > > I just did the change, as requested, since it is up to you to decide
> > > > how
> > > > many slots to ask for, and their kind.
> > > >
> > > > Note however that it may be counter-productive for your interests, in
> > > > two ways.
> > > >
> > > > First, when we ask google for the global number of essential/desired
> > > > slots, and these numbers are the same, it won't look good.  It
> > > > basically
> > > > conveys the feeling that we do not really understand the difference
> > > > between essential and desired.  That will surely lead to get fewer
> > > > slots
> > > > than the number of essential slots we get.
> > > >
> > > > Second, ff we get fewer slots than the number requested (which is
> > > > unusual, but can happen) then we (the admins) will decide how to
> > > > distribute them, with no appeal.  I can tell you that a 1/2 really
> > > > tells
> > > > us more than a 2/2, when it comes to decide what is really essential.
> > > >
> > > > Anyway, its your call ;)