GSoC 2016

[Michael McConville]

Gary Kramlich wrote:
> As you may be aware, Google is going to start taking applications for
> mentoring organizations starting on 2016/02/08 (a week from today) for
> the 2016 Summer of Code.  I'm bringing this up to gauge interest in
> whether or not we should participate.
> 
> Personally I feel that we should get our own house in order before we
> start bringing more students in.  A quick look at our GSoC wiki pages
> would suggest that we don't handle it well.  The 2007 page [1] scares
> me the most.  How do we have 3 projects that are 9 years old and not
> know the status of them?  Also, how is a project from 9 years ago
> dependent on 3.0.0?
> 
> If people are interested and someone is committed to making sure any
> completed projects get merged/seen through we should of course apply,
> but I would like to keep focused on my 3.0 push and thus can't
> dedicate the time to GSoC.
> 
> So, what say you?

I need to re-review my randomness API and get it committed. I'll talk to
Ethan about this soon.

For what it's worth, I think it would be *extremely* helpful to find a
student who's fluent in GLib and/or GTK. The main difficulty I faced
last summer was having to choose between learning these reasonably
complex interfaces and doing immediately applicable work.

I'm sure there are many major simplifications that can be made by
someone who knows a lot about one or both of these and can spend a
summer with Pidgin.