Re: [Banshee-List] Google Summer of Code and Banshee

[Gabriel Burt <gabriel burt gmail com>]

Hi David,

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 8:14 AM, David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com> wrote:
> 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

Well, to be fair, it's hard to hit 85% success with two students.  :)

> 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.

Agreed, I'm disappointed by how this turned out, and I blame myself.
I think we were too ambitious with this project, and did not have a
good plan we could execute on for getting it into master.  I think
that should be the #1 goal of any SoC project/mentor, since with the
success of getting code into the actual project, I'm sure the odds of
that contributor staying on rise.  I would recommend defining the
smallest kernel

> 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.

Agreed again; Neil and Bertrand did a terrific job.  With BCE we are
starting to make up for the fact we didn't get it into master or
shipped, and I'm thrilled Neil has stuck around helping out in other
areas as well as maintaining and further developing his SoC work.
Regarding the ndesk dep, it's actually bundled in BCE, so it's not
that big of a deal.  But, the forking and fragmentation caused by the
lack of a ndesk-dbus release is a big deal for the wider ecosystem, I
agree.  I believe Sandy Armstrong has talked to Alp and gotten
permission to do a release; hopefully that'll be before too long, and
we can maintain it as a community.

> 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.

This definitely counts as a win.  We have integrated parts of his
Windows port into master, too - so even from that perspective, it was
valuable.

> 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?

The biggest limiting factor is the number of mentors.  Aaron, Bertrand
and myself are all not wanting to do it this year, but Alexander has
volunteered.  So we don't need to come up with too many ideas.  I
really like the idea of the libgpod one - I would love to not maintain
that level of our ipod stack.

Gabriel