Summer of Code - Organization Application

This is the application The MacPorts Project will hand in to Google for Summer of Code 2011. We need to have this finished by March, 11th!

Questions

Name

The MacPorts Project

Description

MacPorts is a ports collection and packaging system for Mac OS X. We have an ever-growing collection of ports (currently over 7500), many of which accept multiple configuration variants. MacPorts is one of the primary means by which open source software is compiled for and installed onto Mac OS X, making it a primary interface between Mac OS X and the rest of the open source world.

Homepage

​http://www.macports.org

Main Organization License

New BSD License

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We apply once more as we hope to implement new features 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 has taken part in the program since 2007 and greatly appreciates those contributions. Most of our students completed their projects successfully. Once 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
• 2010: 3/3

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 has served in this job for two years already and also has experience as a previous mentor/co-mentor.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

We require contact information from our students as part of the application. Students should report their progress to their mentor at least once a week. 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 notice, but if this happens we will not let them pass the midterm or final evaluation. Of course we will make this clear from the very beginning of the program and students will be urged to maintain regular communication.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

First of all our mentors from the past years will be around to assist new mentors' introduction to the program. This will ensure that mentors know what is expected from them.

A disappearing mentor has not happened to us, but in the event it happens there will always be other people to help out, usually by assigning 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 information. 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 contact with our students even before they submit their application, via IRC or on our mailing list. During the application phase we will refine and discuss the proposal with other developers. In the program, students are held to the normal development process. They get their own svn branch to work on, and any commits are visible to the whole community. This way anybody can express their critique on the student's work as replies to the commit system's emails, as we also do in general development. Also for specific milestones in their roadmap, we like to see status reports to the public development mailing list. By requiring communication with other people than their respective mentor, we encourage them to work with the spirit of open source development.

As we let students work as one of the organization's developers, we are looking forward to their continued development of MacPorts even after the program concludes. They will be treated like any other developer, which means they get regular commit privileges to help the project as they see fit. This also provides an introduction to future work. This can be seen in our successful motivation of a student to return as a mentor for us.

If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here.

N/A

If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here:

N/A

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

Thanks for hosting the Google Summer of Code program again this year!

Backup organization administrator

William Siegrist, link_id: wsiegrist