[Tcl-soc2008] Tcl GSoC 2009 - missing parts

[Tomasz K. <tk...@da...>]

That are IMHO the missing points for Tcl/Tk/others to be accepted  in GSoC 2009:


1. Who will you be able to submit Tcl GSoC 2009 application and act as an admin?

Will Matthew Burke find enough time or we need someone else to volunteer?

IMHO we *badly* need clear answer who will act as Tcl/Tk organization
admin in year 2009.

I offer myself to help such a person, but I think that to formulate
good aplication we need native English speaker as an admin.

I have reviewed last year application at http://wiki.tcl.tk/20836 and
this year questions - we at least have to fix/fill only a few answers:

- What criteria do you use to select the members of your group
(mentors/admins)? Please be as specific as possible.
- Has your group participated previously? If so, please summarize your
involvement and any past successes and failures (I think I can help
with this --tkosiak)
- What is the application template you would like contributors to your
organization to use (this is a *major* new question but I think we can
gather what was good in student application last year - I can review
them as I have the access to last year students' applications).

but it would be desirable to rework more. Tomorrow I can set up a new
wiki page and give my suggestions, but I will let some native speaker
formulate this well.

One *very *important question is if we can/will act as umbrella
organization for Tcl/Tk + AOLserver/Naviserver/OpenACS/XOTcl/aMSN
which gave us 5 more slots last year.




2. Who is *really* willing to be a mentor this summer (if we got selected)

I think we'll need full mentor name below the project title so
students can easily contact mentor for more info if needed.

* Cliff Flynt mentioned he can mentor up to 2 of
- "TkPrinting"
- "TkTutor"
- "XLS Read/Write"

* Gerald Lester is willing to mentor "Tcl Application Server"

* Andreas Kupries is willing to mentor but which ideas ???

* Steve Huntley "Tclhttpd refurbish" - did I correctly deciphered the mentor?

Steve Landers mentored last year graph related project so maybe it
could be continued
- "Create a graph query language (GraphQL), analogous to the existing TreeQL"
- "Based on the previous comment, create a language to specify and
execute graph transformations"

* William J Giddings "Extending Gnocl support to include Glade and
GtkBuildable UI XML Description Files"

* David N. Welton
"Tray Tip" An implementation of this: http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/325.html
"Create and integrate a theme that integrates Ttk with Gnome/Gtk."

* Pawel Salawa (Googie) - SSH client in Pure-Tcl

* Arjen Markus  "TkLib Enhancements"

Who is willing to mentor these?

* ??? "Coverage Analysis" -  Larry Virden or maybe we can ask Richard
Hipp as he has an expertise in this area with SQLite.
* ??? "Tcl Core Byte Code" - DKF or AK ?
* ??? "Regexp engine cleanup"
* ??? "Curses implementation of Tk"
* ??? TIP 308 TDBC (Tcl DataBase Connectivity) - PostgreSQL & Oracle
Tcl/C drivers are really needed
* ??? "Tcllib enhancements"
* ??? "Tk - factor out of Tk photo image processing" & "Icon thems" &
"Better" communication with window managers/desktop environments like
Gnome and KDE"
* ??? "Gnocl" - What specifically could be done here?

Last year as mentors we also had:

* Patrick Thoyts
* Jeff Hobbs
* Gustaf Neumann (XOTcl or OpenACS)
* Youness El Alaoui (aMSN)
* Tomasz Kosiak (I will write down 2 ideas tomorrow)




3. Our "Ideas page" need *major* improvement.

I think we should group/reformat ideas to bring it into something like
last year http://wiki.tcl.tk/20832.
Except mentioning full mentor name as a link to contact page we should
state at least project difficulty and what is required from a student:
Tcl or C and what else if really needed.

We shall reorder the ideas so those defined more clearly should be
higher. In fact I think that we should somehow top ideas that are
proffered by a community. Students will sometimes only read a few
first entries. That's why I think that we need an index at the top
consisting only from titles linked to anchors.

Another important thing is that we have to include an introduction at
the top. We shall even state that this is "Ideas page" for
Tcl/Tk/AOLserver/Naviserver/OpenACS/XOTcl and give links to proper
home pages, because students may not know those projects. Something
like last year is minimum.

We should advertise we've received 9 student slots (lets even explain
what that meant) and that all those projects were somehow successful
(students completed some work and get *paid*). AFAIR we where as good
as PHP last year.

Quoting from the GSoC FAQ:

What is an "Ideas" list?

An "Ideas" list should be a list of suggested student projects. This
list is meant to introduce contributors to your project's needs and to
provide inspiration to would-be student applicants. It is useful to
classify each idea as specifically as possible, e.g. "must know
Python" or "easier project; good for a student with more limited
experience with C++." If your organization plans to provide an
application template, it would be good to include it on your Ideas
list.

Keep in mind that your Ideas list should be a starting point for
student applications; we've heard from past mentoring organization
participants that some of their best student projects are those that
greatly expanded on a proposed idea or were blue-sky proposals not
mentioned on the Ideas list at all.