RE: Google Summer of Code 2018: Call for mentors and ideas

["Peryt, Sebastian" <sebastian dot peryt at intel dot com>]

Hi Martin,

Frankly speaking I believe that students who discussed topics on mailing list might 
eventually just decide that they were too challenging for them and also competition 
appeared too difficult. As far as I remember student can only pick few organizations and 
maybe they just decided to pick some other projects where they expected higher chance 
of success. After all, as you wrote, it is students work to come up with good projects.

Nevertheless, I'd suggest keeping discussions regarding GSoC projects, that took place in 
mailing list in wiki (as a summary or direct links) for future reference if someone would 
like to better understand how some elements work in GCC or would like to continue those works. 
Without any external link I'm afraid it might get lost in the mailing list soon.

>From my personal point of view I think you did a great work with handling all communication 
regarding GSoC participation and I believe you are a perfect candidate for admin role next year.

Sebastian

> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:08 PM
> Subject: Re: Google Summer of Code 2018: Call for mentors and ideas
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering how much I should announce publicly about GSoC proposals
> since students are not supposed to know in advance that we want any particular
> one before they are officially accepted or not by google, but I hope I will not
> overstep any line by saying the following:
> 
> (I am willing to invite any GCC contributer among the mentors, then you can
> look at the proposals at the GSoC "dashboard" website.  You need gmail account
> for that, however.)
> 
> 
> On Thu, Mar 29 2018, Joseph Myers wrote:
> > Now the student application deadline has, I understand, passed, how do
> > we go about collectively deciding which are the best proposals to
> > request slots for?
> 
> GCC has received 11 proposals for projects, but 7 of them were clearly
> unsuitable (two were completely blank, one was a link to a live google
> document with the string "WIP" in it, one contained only a short CV of the
> applicants, one was three lines suggesting we use a "linked list"
> and "hash tags" for memory management, there was also a proposal for driver
> able to compile C and python in different sections of a single file, and one
> proposal was just spam or an elaborate report on some past java project, I
> cannot tell) and 2 were inferior to the point that I also decided they should not
> be considered.  None of these two was discussed on the mailing list and both
> were basically copied text from an (outdated) wiki page.
> 
> The remaining two are strong candidates, both proposals were discussed at
> length here on the mailing list and so I asked for two student slots.
> My plan forward is basically to sincerely hope that we get two.  If we get only
> one (IIRC we will know on April 10th), I will bring this question up here (but let's
> just toss a coin in that case).
> 
> Generally speaking, I am somewhat disappointed that one or two topics that
> were also discussed on the mailing list did not eventually turn up among the
> proposals.  I should have probably pinged one student and perhaps also two gcc
> developers a bit in order to make them come up with something.  It also did not
> help that I was traveling to an important meeting in the US last week (and I had
> much less time for email than I thought I would).  Nevertheless, it is mostly
> students' responsibility to come up with good projects and there is only so much
> we can do about it.  However, if the community decides I should be the admin
> also next year, I believe I will be able to organize it slightly better.
> 
> Martin