In our continuing series, I had the opportunity to ask Marc Delisle about his project’s experience with the Google Summer of Code.
Rich: Give us an overview of what your project is.
Marc: phpMyAdmin is a web interface for MySQL and Drizzle databases.
Rich: What was your student’s assignment?
Marc: After fourteen years of existence, our code base has grown in many directions and it was time for some refactoring. The two projects I mentored were about refactoring some of the sub-systems inside phpMyAdmin.
Another of our mentors was supervising a student whose project was to remove the usage of HTML frames from the interface.
Rich: Was the assignment completed to your satisfaction?
Marc: Yes, but for one of my projects, testing was incomplete; also, some bugs
have been logged and will need care before this code is released.
Rich: When can we expect to see the fruits of the summer’s work in a released version?
Marc: We usually produce a version with the merged code, about five months
after GSoC.
Rich: Would you participate in GSoC again?
Marc: Sure; this was our fifth year.
Rich: What advice can you give to a project interested in GSoC for next year?
Marc: We have developed wiki pages explaining the selection process and a student guide; this is really important for would-be participants. Also, we only accept students who have contributed some code before.