Revision as of 10:35, 17 July 2007

Some thoughts about the programme for next year

Maintaining an Eclipse projects for SOC is a rather poor fit with the Eclipse development process.

For 2008, we should consider (note that these are just ideas for discussion):

• SOC Students must be treated the same way as other committers.
  • Specifically, they should be elected into the position and are subject to the same requirements
• If a student's work is related to an existing project, they would follow the same process as anybody else
  • Student contribute code through bugzilla like anybody else. That code can be put into CVS by a committer (possibly the mentor) assuming that it meets with standard requirements.
  • Projects can set up an incubator if they deem it necessary.
  • If, over time, the student demonstrates that they are a worthy committer, an election is held.
• If a student's work is not related to an existing project, then a separate home needs to be found
  • For example, a Google Code project (which sort of makes sense)
  • Over the term, the student can consider going through the proposal process to make their project into a real Eclipse project.

The short version is that GSoC students should not be treated any different than other committers.

This is good because:

• Students experience the real Eclipse process.
• It doesn't screw up our process, or reinforce dangerous precedence for bending the rules.
• Lowers dependence on Eclipse Foundation infrastructure to get projects going.

This is bad because:

• Will really only work if mentors are already Eclipse committers.
• Mentors become a bottleneck for getting code committed (though this is probably not necessarily a problem)