[Banshee-List] Google Summer of Code and Banshee

[David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com>]

As GSoC 2010 is coming up and we have had a few good suggestions that would make great SoC projects such as binding libgpod and replacing podsleuth as well as preparing Cubano for mainline merging and making a more "semantic" Now playing view. However as I dipped into the Banshee trackrecord with SoC I discovered that we apparently aren't doing well with SoC, not only do we manage to attract few contributors but their code rarely appears to reach Banshee but being exciting high profile projects our handling of SoC project could be negatively affecting Banshee.

As far as I have been able to find in 2009 we had two projects and the expected success rate is a whopping 85%, Banshee managed at best 50% that year

Mike Urbanski was working on Podcast as a Service. Under his project he regularly posted videos though not many explanations of impact for users. In interaction with users he has also occasionally called for testing of this code. However it has to my knowledge not been merged and Mike has by and large disappeared from the Banshee space. A defeat on two fronts.

Neil's amazing Telepathy integration is now in BCE but depends on ndesk-dbus from git and the ndesk-dbus maintainer Alp Toker hasn't apparently been available for development and thus release management for a while. This is a larger Mono ecosystem problem. For our part though this means that at best we can't currently say we are shipping this to users. Neil rocks though and his execution of the GSoC project is awe inspiring, it's a bold innovative project which Neil kept everyone up to date on using blog posts and videos, he faced and overcame technical problems. Any SoC student should examine his execution.

GSoC 2007 gave us one slot, to port to Windows. The biggest win possibly being the addition of Scott to the Banshee community. Even if Banshee isn't presenting a super experience on Windows, Scott becoming a regular contributor I think counts as a win. 

I would estimate that BCE gives a community for such new developers coming into Banshee as such we should have a better chance of succes this year. 

So with that in mind, do we have any proposals and where do we officially list them?

- David