SummerOfCode2009/Proposal

Contents

Introduction
1. Resources
GDB Application

Introduction

This page exists for the GDB community to collaboratively write GDB's application as a mentoring organization for Google's Summer Of Code 2009. The application submission period for mentoring organizations is from March 9 19:00 UTC to March 13 19:00 UTC. There's a timeline available for the GSoC.

The questions below were taken from the FAQ for Google's Summer of Code 2009.

Update: GDB was not accepted as a project in the Google Summer of Code 2009. Still, students can apply to work on GDB ideas through the GNU Project organization.

Resources

There are examples out there of similar pages from other Open Source projects:

We are also working on ideas for the GSoC.

GDB Application

Organization description

This organization represents the GDB developers community.

GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on `inside' another program while it executes -- or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed.

GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:

Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
Make your program stop on specified conditions.
Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.

Why is your group applying to participate? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We hope to attract new developers for the GDB project, as well as get a helping hand for features and tasks we'd like to move forward.

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

No, this is the first time GDB is applying for the GSoC.

What license(s) does your project use?

GPLv3.

What is the URL for your ideas page?

http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas

What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?

We use gdb [at] sourceware.org for user help and development discussions, and gdb-patches [at] sourceware.org for patch submission and review.

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

#gdb at Freenode.

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

About the applicant
- Identity
  Name:
  E-mail:
  Instant messaging address and protocol:
  Website address(es), e.g., blog, personal website, etc.:
  Experience
  Please describe yourself a little bit: what you are studying, which term you're currently in, your current and previous involvement with free software (if any), previous work and academic experience which is relevant to this project, why working in GDB interests you.
  Copyright assignment
  
  Are you willing and capable of assigning the copyright of the work you do in this Google Summer Of Code project to the Free Software Foundation? See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html for more information about this requirement.
Project
- Title
  Summary
  A short text (up to a few paragraphs) describing your project. List its goals and justify why it is important and how it will benefit GDB.

Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.

Tom Tromey - tromey at peakpeak.com

Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.

Two GDB developers volunteered for mentoring up to now:

Thiago Jung Bauermann - thiago.bauermann at gmail.com
Tom Tromey - tromey at peakpeak.com

What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

Both volunteered. They are also active members of the GDB community. Tom Tromey is also a Global Maintainer in the GDB project.

They are also involved in adding Python scripting support to GDB, one of the projects we'd like to have a student working in. They also have experience fixing a variety of bugs in GDB, which is another task we'd be interested in for the Google Summer of Code.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

We intend to have the students regularly push their code at a public repository (most probably hosted in http://sourceware.org/). If they disapear, someone else can continue from where they stopped. Also, since the FSF requires copyright assignment for all non-trivial contributions, we will get the student's copyright assignment documentation in place before they start coding. This ensures that we can indeed use their code and merge it upstream, even if we can't contact them anymore.

We will also require that students answer messages sent from the mentor or the GDB community to them in at most 3 days. Failure to comply will mean that we will fail them. Exceptions will be made if students warn in advance and tell the reason and days when they'll be unavailable.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

We don't expect that to happen at the moment since both volunteers are regular contributors to GDB. In any case, one can serve as a backup for the other.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

GDB has a remarkably friendly community. We expect that if the students enjoy hacking GDB, they won't have a reason to part from its community. We also intend to have them post regular status update messages to the GDB mailing list, and hang out in the #gdb channel. Hopefuly that will make themselves comfortable with community interaction, and have both the students and the community familiarise with each other.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

If the students get at least part of their work merged upstream, we will give them commit rights to the GDB repository ("Write After Approval" as explained in GDB's MAINTAINERS file).