Welcome to Summer of Code 2012

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Hi Joe, Shivaraman, Shrikrishna, Francisco, Dmitry, Pentalis, Kai-Uwe,

This is your friendly project maintainer speaking...

It's great to have you on board for the Summer of Code 2012 for Krita. This mail has some more information about the Krita project and the way we would to work with students during the Summer of Code. Krita has been in every summer of code since the start so we have quite a bit of experience in how to make gsoc fun and useful!

This year, we have three students from the KDE organization and one from OpenICC. KDE has never had so many students as this year and don't be mistaken: this puts a heavy burden on us all since failure is _not an option_. If too many KDE students fail, Google will be pissed off. So let's make sure all is setup to have a resounding success!

* Time Zones

We're rather spread out this year, with Joe in California, Pentalis in Chile, Francisco 	in Brazil, Shivaraman and Shririshna in India, Dmitry in Russia and Kai-Uwe and me in between, in Western Europe. Please keep this into account. I will be around on irc mostly from 9:00 to 24:00 CET, with breaks for dinner and so on.

* Blogging

Please blog at least once a week, Friday afternoon the latest. I see that Joe already has a blog. Please get your blogs aggregated at both planetkde.org and http://www.graphicsplanet.org/. If English is not your native tongue and you feel uncertain, I can check the first couple of blog posts for you. I've done that for most of the Krita GSOC students.

* Communication

Join the #krita channel on freenode. This is the best place to ask questions and have development discussions, since it's where the experienced Krita developers hang out. 

Join the Krita mailing list: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kimageshop. Also join the calligra mailing list so you are informed about things like release schedules: 
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/calligra-devel. Set up the commit filter (http://commitfilter.kde.org/) so you see all other commits to Calligra -- that way you are in touch with what the other developers and students are doing.

Please introduce yourself and your project on the krita mailing list this week as well.

Do use these two channels for development discussions; this is better than private queries or email conversations with just your mentor because you will get input from other Krita developers.

In order to efficiently introduce everyone to the Krita architecture architecture, I want to organize a skype group chat, maybe one for India and one for the America's. I would like to do this as soon as possible, i.e., this week.

* Hacking

Krita uses git (http://projects.kde.org/calligra). If you don't have it already, get your KDE committer status this week. See http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Get_a_Contributor_Account.

For every Summer of Code project there should be a branch, labeled krita-TOPIC-COMMITER_NAME. Push early, push often. If I don't see a commit for a day, I get worried! 

Also, don't get stuck on something. If you're stuck, go to #krita or the mailing list and ask for help.

Use the coding standards: http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Kdelibs_Coding_Style. This is not optional!


* Individual notes:

Shrikrishna, Dmitry will have to do his military service half-way through the summer. Please make sure that you have completely sucked him dry from all knowledge of the canvas update mechanism as soon as possible since Dmitry is the only real authority on that topic! I will take over mentoring you in the second half.

Shivaraman, also contact the blender development community so you have a fallback to ask about the blender file format and ways to display meshes in 3D. Note that I am a linguist, so most maths are way beyond me.


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl