Google Summer of Code 2018 — Organization Application

This is the application the MacPorts Project will submit to Google for Summer of Code 2018. We need to have this finished by 23 January 2018 at 17:00 UTC.

Questions

Taken from the past few years GSoC application.

Name and Tagline.

The MacPorts Project (Open Source package manager for macOS)

Organization Category.

End User Applications

Technology Tags.

Tcl, C, make, Git

Topic Tags.

Package manager, Mac OS X, macOS, command line

Proposal Tags that students can select (one) from and apply to their own proposals to help organize them.

New Feature, Optimization

Describe your organization.

MacPorts is a port collection and packaging system for macOS. Created in 2002 as DarwinPorts, we have an ever-growing collection of ports (currently over 22000), many of which accept multiple configuration variants. MacPorts itself works on both PowerPC and Intel Macs, running OS X 10.4 through macOS 10.13, and many ports support a similar breadth of systems. As one of the primary means of building and installing open source software on macOS, MacPorts is an important interface between Mac operating systems and the rest of the open source world, greatly simplifying the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac. What year was your project started? 2002.

Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code?

Boosted by the success of the projects done in 2011, 2014 and 2017, we're eager to add new features and increase the user-friendliness of MacPorts. We're hoping to attract new developers that will stay with the project and work on new features and necessary refactoring of our code. Big goals this year are improving the dependency calculation and making the Xcode dependency optional.

Has your org been accepted as a mentor org in Google Summer of Code before? (yes/no)

Yes.

If you answered “yes” to the question above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

MacPorts has participated multiple times since 2007. Most of our students completed their projects successfully, and we greatly appreciate those contributions. We had previous GSoC students coming back as mentors in the following years; for example, our backup administrator was a student for our organization back in GSoC 2015 and one of the mentors from GSoC 2011. I myself participated in GSoC 2017 with MacPorts.

For each year your organization has participated, provide the counts of successful and total students.

Year	Total	Passed	Failed
2007	3	2	1
2008	4	2	2
2009	2	2	0
2010	3	3	0
2011	3	3	0
2013	1	1	0
2014	3	3	0
2015	3	2	1
2017	2	2	0

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

not applicable

What Open Source Initiative approved license(s) does your project use?

​BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" license

What is the URL for your Ideas list?

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

Link to a page describing how to join your organization's mailing list.

https://www.macports.org/contact.php#Lists

Link to a web page that describes how to get on your IRC channel or other real-time communication methods.

https://www.macports.org/contact.php#IRC

Who will be your backup organization administrator?

Jackson Isaac.

How many potential mentors have agreed to mentor this year?

Three.

How will you keep mentors engaged with their students? OR What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

Our mentors from the past years will be available to assist new mentors’ introduction to the program and ensure that mentors know what is expected of them.

A disappearing mentor has occurred once when we also had a disappearing student. When the mentor disappeared, another mentor (who soon after became a MacPorts manager) stepped in to cover.

We’ve made it a rule that mentors will communicate with each other about progress and problems of their students and keep the communication on the public list, allowing for a clean failover to another mentor. This also helps with setting expectations and making evaluations.

Projects will usually have multiple mentors, to provide redundancy if one disappears. If a student cannot reach any of their mentors, they should contact an organization administrator, who will have more contact information. If that fails, they should post to the development mailing list reaching a wide number of developers, admin, and backup admin.

How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects? OR What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? Please be as specific as possible.

We require students' contact information as part of the application. Students will report their progress to their mentor at least once a week, via whichever communication medium works best for both. We know from past experiences that a student can disappear without notice, but if this happens we will not let them pass the midterm or final evaluation. We will make this clear from the start, and students will be urged to maintain regular communication and providing work logs at least twice a week.

How will you get your students involved in your community during GSoC?

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 proposals with other developers. In the program, students participate in our normal development process: they get their own Git branch to work on, all their commits are publicly viewable, and any member of the MacPorts community can provide feedback by replying to the commit system’s emails. We also like students to post status reports to the public development mailing list as they reach specific milestones. By requiring communication with people other than their mentors, we encourage them to work in the spirit of open source development.

How will you keep students involved with your community after GSoC?

As we let students work as one of the projects developers, we look forward to their continued development of MacPorts after GSoC concludes. Like any other developer, they will get regular commit privileges to help the project as they see fit; this also provides an introduction to future work. Multiple students have returned as mentors or admins in the following years, demonstrating the effectiveness of this method.

If you are a new organization to GSoC, is there a Google employee or previously participating organization who will vouch for you? If so, please enter their name, contact email, and relationship to your organization.

not applicable

What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

We keep all students’ work in our source repository and rebase it often so it’s ready to be integrated. Seeing a student’s code “go live” and get used by the project is the single best incentive. We also plan to keep in contact with the student to see if there are additional areas of MacPorts that might interest them for long-term involvement.

Where does your source code live?

GitHub: ​https://github.com/macports

Is there anything else we should know or you'd like to tell us that doesn't fit anywhere else on the application?

not applicable