Re: Another year, another summer of code!

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2013-03-27 at 00:07 +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
> It's almost April again, and as the new stable release reaches the
> distributors, we're all looking forward for another exciting round of
> development. But April means also that the student applications for
> summer of code are open.
> So, just like last year, I'm mailing you, GNOME Shell maintainers and
> developers, in search of good ideas to keep my summer busy.
> I see three main themes to provide inspiration:

Hi Giovanni -

I'm delighted that you are interested in doing a GSoC project with us
again!

> - Wayland
>   The release-team set this as a goal for 3.10, and there is so much
> to do to reach feature parity with X11!
>   Given that most of the compositing parts are already implemented,
> this would be about one of the smaller features (listed in
> l.g.o/Wayland/GnomeShell or l.g.o/Wayland/GTK+)

We're going to need a lot of help to get to a full Wayland GNOME for
3.12 - the more we can have done for 3.10 the better. I think there are
a ton of projects here that are substantial but doable in a few months.
Also look at:

https://live.gnome.org/Wayland/Gaps

Some projects that seem about appropriately sized:

 - Display Configuration (especially if digging down and learning how
   KMS, etc, work is interesting to you.)

 - ICCCM/EWMH replacement. This is going to require a lot of
   communication with the Wayland team and other projects to try
   and standardize as much as makes sense.

 - Overlay support in GNOME Shell/GTK+/Clutter. Make Totem work with YUV
   overlays, use overlays or direct-scanout for fullscreen games as
   appropriate. (Check with rib/bpeel on this one to see what their
   plans are.)

But really almost anything on the /Gaps page could make a good project. 

> - Finishing features that we're dragging on from older releases
>   From extension updates to magnifier improvements, there is some
> stuff that we always planned for gnome-shell and never got around to
> implement. This could be the right time.

Since you have the knowledge and skills to do larger projects involving
multiple modules and new development, I think it would be good to find
you such a project than do a bunch of smaller things. Things like
extension updates (as much as I'd like to see that done!) and magnifier
improvements wouldn't really keep you busy for the full summer.

That being said, if something here really interests you, we can
definitely figure out something that will work. E.g., Jasper may have
ideas about what else could be combined with Extension Updates to take
Extensions to the next level.

> - New gnome-shell features from the design
>   If you look at the design pages in l.g.o, not all the mockups were
> implemented in 3.8. So I can pick what you think is a priority.

I'll defer to the design team - whether they think there is anything
that they really want to see done that would make a good project.

> Obviously, there is also a forth choice: you can say that gnome-shell
> is wonderful as is, and my time is better spent somewhere else. I'm
> open to suggestions in that case.

Have no fear - we can find a project for you somehow related to GNOME
Shell!

- Owen