News
Post-mid-term changes (By uriel Last mod: Aug 2 2007 )
First of all, I want to thank all the students and mentors who have worked hard to make this GSoC successful.
The mid-term evaluations are over, and there are both good and bad news and some important changes on how we are going to work from now on.
The good news: some projects have made amazing progress and are well underway to archive their main goals, congratulations to everyone who got this far.
The bad news: many projects are way behind schedule, and what is worse, due to lack of open communication it is impossible to estimate what their exact status is and what changes need to be made to bring them back on track.
During the first half of GSoC everyone got a free hand to organize their projects in any way they wanted, no requirements were made and there was no control of how projects were going.
It was probably naive to assume things would work out fine this way, but it probably was a lesson we needed to learn.
Starting next week every project should at least follow this basic requirements:
Students should post to their blog or in this list at least twice a week with project status updates, including a short summary of what progress has been made and what is next and any problems or issues holding things back.
All source code should be publicly available, ideally in a mercurial repository in the http://gsoc.cat-v.org/hg/ site.
All student-mentor communication should occur in public channels, either irc or public mailing lists. If currently no appropriate communication channels for the project exist, a new one should be created (either by creating a new irc channel in freenode or new mailing list in google-groups)
Mentors should post at least once a week with a short update on how they think the project is progressing.
If either mentors or students have trouble reaching each other at any point, the plan9-gsoc list or irc channels should be notified immediately of the situation.
Every project should keep a short list of major goals, and update it with which ones have been accomplished already and which are still pending.
If at any point the project is behind schedule, a plan to get it back on schedule should be created and published.
Both students and mentors should subscribe to plan9-gsoc to make announcements like this possible (I have added everyone now, so nobody should need to do anything for this)
If for any reason someone can't comply with one of this requirements, we will be very understanding, but we need to know why.
Lets hope this improves how things work in the second half of the summer and ensures that all projects are successful.
Best wishes to everyone
the Plan 9 GSoC admin.
Fixed RSS feeds (By uriel Last mod: Jun 19 2007 )
RSS feeds were broken for a while, they should be working properly again, sorry for the inconvenience.
First general IRC meeting (By uriel Last mod: Jun 14 2007 )
I hope that all your projects are going well. Given that all projects should be underway by now, and that almost all participants got accounts at http://gsoc.cat-v.org now it is a good time to get together in irc and see what everyone is up to and discuss any issues anyone might have.
Two irc meetings per week are planned, so don't worry too much if you can't attend one of them. The first one will be tomorrow at 22:00 UTC. The location as usual is #plan9-gsoc in irc.freenode.org (and don't forget that you probably can hold of someone there any time of the day or night if you have any questions or problems.)
New website code and rss feeds (By uriel Last mod: Jun 4 2007 )
Kris has been heavily reworking and cleaning up the code that runs this site (now can be found in the hg repo under werc) including implementing rss feeds for all blogs!
There have also been some minor improvements, like automatic blog setup for user and project blog directories and other minor fixes.
Dave Eckhardt proposed that we have a table of projects that tracks the last commit and last blog post for each project, a prototype of this can be found in /projects/table.
Enjoy and please report any issues or suggestions in #plan9.
More information about gsoc resources (By uriel Last mod: May 31 2007 )
I have created a page that documents the resources and services provided by gsoc.cat-v.org, please take a look and let me know if there is anything else you would like to see.
Mercurial web interface (By uriel Last mod: May 30 2007 )
I have setup the web interface for the mercurial repos, feel free to start pushing the repos for your projects under /gsoc/hg/.
Site is up (By uriel Last mod: Jun 20 2007 )
The first version of the Plan 9 GSoC site is up!
Things are still being worked on, and most people don't have their accounts setup yet. The mercurial repos and 9P access will be next.
Update: Per-project blogs webpages were also broken, I fixed them now, all blogs should be working properly now.