Mercurial's application to be a mentoring org for GSoC 2013.
Organization id
hg
Organization name
Mercurial
Organization description
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface.
Organization home page url
Main organization license
GPLv2 or later
Veteran/New
Veteran
Backup Admin
durin42
If you chose "veteran" in the dropdown above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.
If you chose "new" in the dropdown above, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
[blank]
Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2013? What do you hope to gain by participating?
Mercurial is a powerful and featureful DVCS with a very lively community which would benefit from more exposure. We hope that participating in GSoC 2013 will give us this exposure and attract young hackers to Mercurial. Indeed, we have already identified potential enthusiastic student collaborators who would benefit from the financial incentive and from the mentoring experience. We just need a push in order to attract these and potentially others.
What is the URL for your Ideas list?
http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/SummerOfCode/Ideas2013
What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
#mercurial in Freenode
What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible.
We have many core developers (the "crew", as we call them) who have already expressed interest in being mentors. These are obviously already selected as mentors. Those who have mentored in the past have also been accepted to mentor again.
Should anyone else volunteer to mentor, we will first carefully judge their past contributions to Mercurial or its extensions. We would require evidence that this person has already have experience hacking Mercurial or creating extensions for it before we accept them as a possible mentor, and for what projects.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
We have a friendly atmosphere in Mercurial, and the community generally has a relaxed atmosphere, so we hope at least that students won't disappear because we scared them away.
Regardless, we will be in continuous contact with students. The bare minimum contact with a student will be an email or blog post once a week, but we will also encourage IRC continuous presence and more frequent emailing. If a student fails to provide this weekly email, we will escalate contact according to the methods that we have (email, IRC or IM contacts, finally, phone call). If the student can't be reached in this way within two weeks, we will declare the code abandoned, salvage whatever we decide is worthwhile and with heavy hearts fail the student.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We think a disappearing mentor would be a very rare occurrence, since the Mercurial community is tight-knit and very active. Many of us have met face-to-face during semi-regular code sprints.
If a mentor nevertheless disappears and we really can't reach him or her, we can redistribute the mentoring workload amongst the remaining mentors.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?
In order to attract students before the program starts, we want to make a clear statement about diversity, following the Python Software Foundation's statement. Mercurial welcomes female students and more generally of all backgrounds. We are proud to announce that we already have very active female presence amidst our contributors. We actively encourage more women to apply!
We also want to get acquainted with students before the program starts. We exhort them to to talk to us on the mailing lists and on IRC. We also want a patch or two before the program! We will encourage students to show us a little of what they can do before the program starts. Although GSoC already requires this, we will nevertheless stress and make sure the students understand that we expect them to treat GSoC as a full time job.
During the program, it is very important to keep these lines of communication of open, and we will reiterate this to the students. In addition to those already mentioned, we will also suggest that they use the bug tracker and the wiki to communicate and track the progress of their project.
What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?
We will tell students from the beginning that the expectation is to become long-term contributors to the project.
We think the best way for them to stay involved with Mercurial is to see what other developers are working on themselves too. We will present them with active ongoing work from other developers as pertains to the students' own work.
Additionally, all feedback related to their own work will be sent directly to the student. We hope that by getting bug reports and kudos about their own work, their involvement will stay after the beginning.
Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.
We're not new, but our backup admin is Googler Augie Fackler, and he can vouch for us.
Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here.
No.