GSoC improvements

[Leo Franchi]

On 4 Mar 2009, at 07:16, Mark Kretschmann wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:29 AM, Dan Meltzer
> <parallelgrapefruit at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 7:25 PM, Lydia Pintscher <lydia at kde.org>  
>> wrote:
>>> I have been thinking about what we can improve this year wrt to the
>>> code that gets written during GSoC. As last year was the first  
>>> year we
>>> had a lot of newcomers as students I think there are some things we
>>> can improve this year on the coding side.
>>> One big problem last year was that some students commited huge  
>>> chunks
>>> of code that only very few people or even no-one reviewed post  
>>> commit.
>>> So I guess we should make it very very clear that we want to see
>>> smaller commits on a more regular basis.
>>> Is there anything else that could be useful? What is your opinion  
>>> on a
>>> more formal code review pre or post commit?
>>
>> I feel like the mentor should be responsible for code review of the
>> student.  I think we need to setup crucible to make this more doable
>> (it's annoying to review code on the mailing list).  Whether or not  
>> it
>> happens pre or post commit can probably be left up to the
>> mentor/student pair, or perhaps reccomend pre-commit review for the
>> first few commits, and then when the mentor feels confident that the
>> student will a) maintain style and b) has a good idea of the overall
>> amarok design, it could switch to post-commit review.
>
> I simply don't have the time to review every single commit. While this
> is a fine idea in theory, in reality there needs to be a certain level
> of trust between our students and us (btw, I don't believe in the
> one-mentor-per-student concept - we always help where we can).
>

This is why we are a team :) Not all of us will be able to read every  
single commit that every single student makes and properly review it.  
But collectively we can make it happen.


> Additionally, what Ian said in another branch of this thread is
> probably true: Git will help here a lot.


This does actually require us to be have already switched to git, and  
as Ian said.... he needs to start working on scripty. I don't think we  
can "assume" anything about us having git, until the work actually  
gets done.

lelo

---
Leo Franchi				(650) 704 3680
Tufts University 2010

lfranchi at kde.org
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu