Re: [Gaim-devel] gaim-vv support

[Ethan B. <ebl...@cs...>]

Salvatore Benedetto spake unto us the following wisdom:
> I do understand that is probably complex to implement, and definetely
> not an easy task. I also understand that students that apply for such
> as project might not have enough knowledge to design on their own the
> API needed, but why not taking in consideration valid students, that
> are willing to work all summer (and maybe more), locked in their room
> (as somebody said in the channel ;-) ) , on this project? Maybe not on
> the whole thing, but the project I think could be modularized, so that
> students could produce useful code by the end of the summer. I don't
> think it would be a totally waisting of time.

I don't think anyone is saying that Gaim-vv would not be *considered*
as a SoC project.  However, experience tells us that any but the most
prepared and organized student is not likely to be successful in this
topic, and we want students to be successful.  Due to this experience,
a proposal to work on gaim-vv type topics would have to stand out as a
powerful application that really showed that the student knew the
scope of the project he/she was getting into, and had some plan for
how to tackle it.

In other words, the application bar is simply higher.  This isn't
because we think it's a bad idea, but because we know it's a hard
problem.  As you said, clearly defining a subset of the problem and
presenting a plan for resolving that subset is probably a good tactic
to take, if your heart is really set on -vv functionality.

Ethan

--=20
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		-- Cesare Beccaria, "On Crimes and Punishments", 1764