Re: ghop

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi,

Le jeudi 24 janvier 2008, à 08:49 -0500, Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak a écrit :
> 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.

For people who don't know what GHOP is:
  http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/

Glad to see it was a good thing for gthumb! All feedback about GHOP is
valuable. There are many things that could have been done better, I'm
sure. So, other people, feel free to tell us what you feel about it.

And let me thank here Andre, who has done an amazing job for GHOP. I'm
sure he didn't know he would be doing so much work when he first heard
about it ;-)

> 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?

Obviously, we don't know what Google is planning, and I don't think
anybody knows this either...

As for doing it within GNOME, it's an option. It might be hard in 2008
since the budget is nearly done -- except if we get some new money for
this, I guess :-)

What we can certainly do is keep a list of such tasks somewhere. I think
we'd need an easy way to manage this, though. Bugzilla could work, if we
agree on some whiteboard words, I guess. It would be a bit like the
gnome-love bugs. The hard thing is to have people correctly tag the
bugs. Thinking about it, it might be better to try to organize the
gnome-love bugs in a better way.

Would you like to work on setting this up?

> 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.)

Yep, many many 1 week tasks :-)

Also, are you fine if I forward your mail to the Google people? I'm sure
they'll be happy to read your mail.

Thanks,

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.