[Live-demo] Google Summer of Code ideas for the LiveDVD

[Alex Mandel]

Just wanted to note that I suggested building a deb package for mapguide
 on the SOC mailing list in response to some mapguide ideas. That's one
OSGeo project we don't have at all on the Live disc because it's so hard
to get working outside of windows right now.

Alex

Cameron Shorter wrote:
> Hamish,
> Good feedback, I've struck out the "Consistent Datasets" idea, and left
> the "Automated Testing".
> 
> 
> Hamish wrote:
>> Cameron wrote:
>>  
>>> I've set up a page for Google Summer of Code ideas here:
>>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc_GSoC_2010
>>>
>>> What other ideas should we add?
>>>     
>>
>> Keep in mind that documentation writing, website overhauls, and other
>> non-
>> coding chore-work, while important, are specifically outside the scope of
>> GSoC. One of the requirements to get paid is a code deliverable which
>> the student need to upload to Google at the end of the summer, which
>> contains their & only their work. Which in a practical sense & for better
>> or worse mostly means it is useful for succinct lone-wolf style projects.
>>
>> On the other hand, projects which bring together multiple
>> within-mentoring
>> organization projects (& dev teams) as well as multiple mentoring-orgs is
>> to be encouraged. (I suspect gaining buy-in and SCM check-in trust from a
>> wide pool of projects will require a special & widely known and hands-
>> on mentor, otherwise it makes me nervous about giving the student a
>> project which is destined to stall.)
>>
>> So working to get test-suite* & buildbot scripts implemented in all OSGeo
>> projects could be a suitable project, but a project to create a common
>> dataset probably would not be funded.
>>
>> [*] (but isn't that supposed to be already-solved as an incubation
>> milestone?)
>>
>>
>>  
>>> Hamish, I wonder whether you would want to mentor a student
>>> who migrates liveDVD packages to .deb files?
>>>     
>>
>> The SoC admin team (which includes me) have decided this year to split
>> our time amongst all the student projects instead of trying to that as
>> well.
>> And so I won't be a primary mentor on any project, and would only
>> consider
>> backup-mentoring if it dealt with code which I was the sole maintainer
>> of,
>> & so was absolutely necessary.
>>
>> Putting stuff in a .deb package is rather simple. Getting stuff packaged
>> to pass Debian QA review is a whole other story and much more important.
>> (the great advantage of .deb over .rpm has very little to do with the
>> technical merits of the two package formats, & has everything to do with
>> the standards & peer-review process, IM(biased)O)
>>
>> To do a good job the mentor for such a project should really be a full
>> Debian Developer (DD) already, which I am not. You could ask for
>> volunteers on the DebainGIS mailing list if you like, but in most cases
>> I suspect it will mainly come down to debianizing Java packages, which
>> really means working to get those Java programs to work with a version of
>> Java which does not require a click-through agreement. Either by patching
>> the program or by helping to improve the open JRE itself.
>>
>> So while on the surface this looks like a .deb project, I really think
>> under the surface it's an inter-project Java one. Once the java problems
>> are solved the .debs can flow relatively easily..
>>
>>
>> regards,
>> Hamish
>>
>>
>>
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>>   
> 
>