Summer of Code - Organization Application

This is the application The MacPorts Project will hand in to Google for Summer of Code 2010. We need to have this finished by March, 12th!

Questions

Describe your organization.

MacPorts is a ports collection and packaging system for Mac OS X. We have a growing number of about 5600 ports currently, many of which accept multiple variants. MacPorts is one of the primary means by which open source software is compiled for and installed onto Mac OS X, and is thus a primary interface between Mac OS X and the rest of the open source world.

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We apply again as we hope to get new features implemented in MacPorts. We also intend to attract new developers to our project and its community. With new feature additions and enhancements to our components (e.g. our GUI) we hope to become more user-friendly for the average Mac OS X user.

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

MacPorts is taking part in the program since 2007 and greatly appreciates those contributions. Most of our students completed their projects successfully. Last year we even had a previous GSoC student as a mentor in our team, which is great.

If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006.

• 2007: 2/3
• 2008: 2/4
• 2009: 2/2

If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

N/A

What license(s) does your project use?

New BSD License

Homepage

​http://www.macports.org

What is the URL for your ideas page?

​http://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

​http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/options/macports-dev

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

#macports on FreeNode (irc.freenode.org)

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

SummerOfCodeApplicationTemplate

What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible.

Our mentors are active developers from the community. Most of the mentors proposed ideas we list on our ideas page and are therefore familiar with the topics. We will make sure that the mentor for a specific project will have the necessary knowledge in the particular problem domain. Our organization administrator already took this job in 2009 and has experience as mentor/co-mentor in 2008/2009.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

We require contact information from our students as part of the application. Students should report at least once a week their progress to their mentor. We leave it open which communication medium to be used as student and mentor should use what works best for both. We know from past experiences that a student can just disappear without any absence notice, but if this happens we will not let them pass midterm or the evaluation at the end. Of course we will make this clear from the very beginning of the program and students will be urged to do their regular reports.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

First of all our mentors from the past years will be around to introduce new mentors to the program. This will ensure that mentors are aware what is expected from them.

A disappearing mentor never really happened in the past for us, but there will always be other people to help out. Usually we try to assign more than one mentor to a project. If the student cannot reach any of their mentors, they should contact the organization administrator which will have more contact informations. The mentors will communicate among each other about progress and problems of the student, so that it would be possible for another mentor to take over.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

We like to make first contact with our students even before they submit their application. During the application phase we will refine and discuss the proposal with other developers. In the program, students are hold to the normal development process. They get their own branch to work on, but any commits are visible to the whole community. Anybody can express their critique on the student's work as replies to the commit emails, as we also do it in general development. Also for specific milestones in their roadmap, we like to see status reports to the public development mailing list.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

...

Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team?

...?

Backup organization administrator

William Siegrist (wms)