Mercurial's application to be a mentoring org for GSoC 2013.
Describe your organization
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface.
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.
Did your organization participate in past Google Summer of Codes? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
Yes, in 2010 and 2011. In 2012 we were rejected as an independent organisation and instead worked under the Python Software Foundation.
If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
We participated in 2010 and 2011.
What Open Source Initiative approved license(s) does your project use?
We use GPLv2 or later.
What is the URL for your Ideas page?
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
Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
[Should we have one?]
Who will be your backup organization administrator?
[Help, someone please volunteer to be a backup admin?]
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 accepted as mentors.
Should anyone else volunteer to mentor, we will first carefully judge their past contributions to Mercurial or its extensions. We would require evince 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, during and after 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 female presence in the crew. 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.
During the program, it is very important to keep these lines of communication of open, and we will stress this accordingly. 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.
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. We hope that by creating an engaging atmosphere, we can maximise the odds of acquiring new long-term contributors.
Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.
Googler Augie Fackler can vouch for Mercurial, as he's a member of the crew.
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.