ghop

["Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak" <mjc avtechpulse com>]

My thanks to whoever arranged for gnome's participation in ghop! It was 
great as a coding exercise, and great as a PR/outreach exercise.

I found it extremely valuable for roping in contributions to gthumb, to 
implement features that were beyond my areas of expertise (e.g., calling 
exiv2's C++ API from gThumb's C code) or just weren't high enough on my 
list of personal priorities (scripting improvements). The motivation of 
reward and the imposition of 1 week deadlines kept things moving nicely, 
too.

And I know that the students gained useful real-world experience that 
will help them mature as programmers - yes, compiler warnings are bad - 
yes, console warnings are bad - yes, you really do need g_free - yes, 
you should test your patch before submitting :-)

Many of these students will come back as valuable gnome users and 
contributors.

I would like to see this program continue! Is there any chance of 
keeping it going more frequently than annually? Could gnome do something 
like it in-house if google doesn't?

I think there is a virtually endless supply of ~ 1 week tasks that would 
benefit from this program. (Porting things from gnome-vfs to gvfs / gio 
/ gfile is the most obvious, and high priority, area for me. I cringe 
when I see all the gnome_vfs calls in gthumb... It's not going to happen 
any time soon if I have to do it all.)


- Mike