Some questions concerning GSoC 2012

[Phitherek_ <phitherek gmail com>]

Hello,

I am a student, who is considering taking part in Google Summer of Code 2012. I have chosen your organization as probably a future mentoring organization. I have not submitted the proposal, as I want to ask you some questions about your expectations. I am posting this on the epiphany list, because the idea of Epiphany Sync interested me as the project I maybe would like to work on. And as the #epiphany channel on IRC seems dead, I decided to try with a mailing list, as I heard they are the most commonly used tool to communicate in bigger open source project.

1. I want to know, what time would you expect me to spend on the project (I mean kind of schedule). The problem is, that I have my exam period when the first period of GSoC programming starts, and as I am on my first year of studies, this period will be very hard and I will sure have to devote much time for it. Is it possible for me to do less coding on the start and then, after my exam period, do more? I know, that GSoC is supposed to be a full-time job, but I am worried that I will not manage to deal with both my studies and GSoC. Or maybe should I wait until next year? I would be grateful if you could give me some advice on that.

2. The requirements say, that I should know C and GTK+/GLib. I have done some programming in C++ and I have started C in my studies, I also created some smaller programs using GTK+ 2 (and GLib in the amount I needed it to do simple actions in my programs, so very little in fact). I do not know if these skills are enough and I hope, that you will give me some clue on that. Also, I would like to know in what fields I should look for some knowledge and learn before start of coding (I mean e.g. network in C? ciphering algorithms?). Or maybe I should choose what to learn and how I want to do it?

3. In your GSoC info page you say, that I should fix some minor bug before applying. I planned to try it, but I could not build Epiphany with JHBuild. The main problem is, that I use Arch Linux, where since some time ago the default version of Python is Python 3 (and this is "python"), and Python 2 is executed by "python2". The buildscripts are written in Python 2, but they all have "python" and not "python2" in the #!. This is, however, kind of easy to fix. I got stuck when I tried to build glib and I had to remove more and more lines in the script to work - in the end that had not worked anyway. It was something with "parser.py". Could you help me also with that?

Ok, I know, this is quite a lot and maybe not everything in the right place, but this is my first time I am contacting a bigger Open Source developer community (until now, I have only been using the software and, sometimes, take part in user' s community, but that was all. I also created some projects on my own but, obviously, these are small projects and do not have the community (yet?)), so I am quite confused.

I hope that you will help me.

Greetings,

-----------------------------------------
Piotr Żurek
phitherek gmail com