Hi all,

I think Google has still not put out the official announcement about accepted proposals, but they've emailed the students. I checked with google last night, and there have been no changes in Inkscape's projects from what I announced earlier.

Students may begin work immediately; it would be good for all students and mentors to touch base and say hello. As well, here's some info that will hopefully help fill in a few blanks:

Summer Schedule: ---------------- May 23 - Google notifies selected students Students may begin work on projects

Jun 30 - Mid-program mentor evaluations of student progress due

Aug 21 - Student projects due

Sep 5 - Mentor and student evaluations due

Release Early, Release Often: ----------------------------- One of the principles of open source development is that you publish your code as you go. This is different than what students may be used to, but it is extremely important that this be followed.

Students should plan on putting out a series of releases of their work through the summer. These releases don't need to be perfect, or even particularly remarkable, but by putting out releases, others can provide interim feedback so that by the end of the summer there will be no doubt that the student has been successful.

For the mid-program evaluation, mentors should take into account whether the student has released their code in their evaluation.

SVN Access: ----------- Google requires that all students conduct their work in a public repository. For inkscape, this will be Inkscape's subversion service hosted at sourceforge.net.

We have a simple policy for gaining SVN access to be followed. The applicant submits two patches and has them accepted, then requests access from one of the admins (Mental, Bulia, myself, or Jon Cruz).

Some students have already qualified; for those who havent, they should simply send a couple simple patches (maybe the start of the SOC work? or a small bugfix?)

SVN Branches: ------------- Since we are in feature freeze, the student's work should be done on a branch in SVN. Even if we weren't in feature freeze, this would be good practice.

The mentor should probably either set up this branch for the student, or help the student create it.

Merging to Head: ---------------- The mentor and student should also plan to move the branch to HEAD at an appropriate point during the summer. It should occur at some point after the 0.44.0 release, but before the end of the SOC program.

As part of this process, the student will also need to work with other inkscape developers to resolve integration problems, bugs, or other issues that arise. For this reason, integrating early will give the most gain and least pain. ;-)

(The merge is likely a point where the student will really need his mentor's help the most.)

Blogs: ------ Last year we enjoyed following student's progress via their blogs. This is entirely optional, but if the student wishes to run a blog, it can be aggregated at planet.inkscape.org; contact nicu at nicubunu dot ro.

Bryce